One of the things I always like about FileMaker is how you can quickly you develop new features. It’s surely the fastest application development environment going around these days.
For the last week, all of my development time has been in BaseElements, fixing a memory issue and some other rather major changes to the import engine. But on Wednesday I got a feature request from a user that asked “Does BaseElements include Fonts for layout objects?” I’d actually typed up a complete response, saying basically that it doesn’t at present, it’s kinda complex how the DDR presents this info but that it’s a good idea and I’ll put it in the todo list. I never like these responses, although I think they’re the best option, my todo / ideas list for BaseElements is huge and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get through them all.
But before I hit send on the email, I actually thought I could take some time to investigate it a little further and see what I can find out. Which is always dangerous for me, I tend to like to find the answers to things once I’ve started investigating. And within a couple of hours, I had a working font name import into BaseElements, including the use of a previously unused xsl function : preceding-sibling.
And so I was able to bin the draft email I’d typed out and retype a new one to say “it’s implemented and will be in the next update”, which is the most satisfying response to a feature request of all 🙂
But that wasn’t the only issue I managed to sort out this week. I also had a note about a bug I’d also previously noticed. My option to show Web Compatibility in the steps portal was broken. So instead of only fixing that, I’ve added three extra checkboxes, for Server, FMGo and Runtime compatibility and added step highlighting for all four options.
So as soon as I’ve run some more tests for the memory issue, which is looking like it’s solved, I’ll upload BE 3.0.3 and in this version is a new field called “Fonts” in the layout object table, and three more checkboxes for Scripts and Steps.
All in all a very satisfying development week.