My blog celebrates its 1st birthday. One year ago I started with a long post, supposedly leaking early information about FileMaker Pro 10. At that time, the newest version FileMaker Pro 10 was out three months. A couple visitors read my post, got confused, got exited, and finally got it when they read the last line of the post that everything was just an April Fools’ joke.

But was it just a joke? I though about it more as a wish list or an suggestion for new features in FileMaker. Did it helped? At least some visitors had their fun reading the post. And I know, it got the attention at FileMaker Inc. It is up to you to decide, if any of my suggestions were picked up by FileMaker and used as inspiration for the new program. FileMaker Pro 11 is finally there. It offers many new features, many of them have not been on my published wish list (I never wrote about charts).

But some new things were not so far from my suggestions. The new Inspector for example was mentioned in my post – not under the name Inspector of course, but I extended the old Info box to offer the developer better access to change object attributes. And I said something about merge fields and the problem with the long names and therefore over-sized merge objects. FileMaker allows now to use Merge Variables, and these can be as short as a simple “$i”. So, am I responsible for these new features in FileMaker Pro 11? I do not think so. I rather like to think, that some people at FileMaker and I are thinking in the same direction.
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