Today, FileMaker, Inc. released the update to FileMaker Pro 11 that was promised at the time of Lion’s release in July. I just downloaded the software and plan to apply the upgrade. Other Lion-related issues are bound to surface eventually but I expect them to be minor.

The update is recommended for all FileMaker 11 installations. You can download from the FileMaker site here.

FileMaker identifies the following fixes:

• OS X Lion only: Addressed an issue with some date field formats showing Asian characters.
• OS X Lion only: Addressed an issue with not being able to use zero or negative numbers in data formatting in the Inspector and in some controls in the Chart Setup dialog.

The prudent among you will take your own sweet time upgrading to Lion. I really don’t recommend upgrading to Lion as yet in a mission critical situation such as a Studio Manager installation. For one thing, the promised update to FileMaker Server 11 is not due until October and Lion itself is still Quite buggy.

Lion 10.7.1. Some bugs were addressed today with the release of Lion 10.7.1 but there are still lots of people online who’ve downloaded 10.7.1 who are saying their Lion-related problems remain.

OS X Lion is due shortly and FileMaker user’s need to know what to expect before upgrading. FileMaker 8 or lower will not run at all on Lion. Only FileMaker 11 will be certified and supported. A small upgrade to FileMaker 11 that will support Lion is in the works.

Here’s what FileMaker says about Lion as of July 8:

FileMaker is excited about the powerful features in OS X Lion and iOS 5. We are committed to be compatible with the latest Apple operating systems and the shipping versions of FileMaker products will be updated to support OS X Lion and iOS 5.

Bottom line:

FileMaker 11 needs a minor update for Lion which is not yet available (as of July 16 2011).

FileMaker 8 will not run at all on Lion. It was developed as a PowerPC app. It is not a Universal App so requires Rosetta which is not supported in Lion. This means any version of FileMaker prior to version 8.5 will not run under Lion.

You need FileMaker 11 to run Lion. We may learn in the trenches that the bugs you will encounter running a lower version of FileMaker are tolerable, but we don’t know that yet and FileMaker Inc. does not have the resources to make sure that FileMaker 10 or less will run well on Lion.

I’ll update this post as more is revealed.

Now here is a deal if you want a copy of FileMaker Pro cheap. Normally FileMaker Pro is $299. Right now if you buy a $20 copy of FileMaker Go for iPhone or the $40 copy for iPad, you can buy a full copy of FileMaker Pro for $149. Read the full press release.

We are testing versions of Studio Manager to see if there are any gotchas to running the brand new and fabulous FileMaker Pro 11. Initial testing shows that running Studio Manager 10 unmodified will entail some misbehavior. Until we’ve tested Studio Manager 10 extensively under FileMaker 11, we recommend against upgrading. We typically take 30-45 days to do this testing.

If you are as eager to check out FileMaker 11 as we are, we recommend you get FileMaker 11 or the trial version and play with it, even test a copy of your version of Studio Manager with it as long as you have Studio Manager 7 or higher. The charting feature alone may prove invaluable for your business. We’ll be very interested in your discoveries and will document and publish what we learn. What we don’t recommend is taking your production version of Studio Manager and running it under FileMaker 11 before some serious testing has been done. This is your valuable, mission-critical data after all.

You need OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher to run FileMaker 11 and 10.6 Snow Leopard is recommended. Keep an eye on this blog for breaking news relative to both FileMaker 11 and Studio Manager. The Look and feel of the product has a major yet very subtle upgrade going on. End-user charting is there.

Expect a quick release of Studio Manager 10.1 to quickly take advantage of new feature low-hanging fruit and nip any problems in the bud.

I’m tweeting my initial impressions and thoughts on tokerud.

I will be posting at least one article to my FileMaker Fever blog today on FileMaker 11 new features.

I have been trying to do some importing with fairly large interrelated files using FileMaker Pro 10.3 and Snow Leopard in single-user mode. I’ve had several crashes in about a 1/2 hour of efforts. Will now be switching to a machine with Leopard installed and re-do the work. Be forewarned that unspecified problems with FileMaker Pro 10 and Snow Leopard may occur. I’m sure we’ll get clarification soon. I will post an update once I know more. Meanwhile I would recommend against running this combo for the time being.

Update Sep 6 noon PDT: The problem may not be with FileMaker 10. The problem I experienced may be due to one or more of my Filemaker plugins that need updates. I will get all my current plugins up to date and then test again. 360Works updated all of their plugins for Snow Leopard on August 28.

Update Sep 8 11am PDT: Removed all extensions in the FileMaker applications folder. Haven’t tested extensively, but I’ve had a couple crashes of FileMaker since then. Maybe I have a specific other conflict with FileMaker. But what? Next project is to try running FileMaker as the only running app and do a few things and see how that goes.

Resource: Camp Software has good blog post summarizing known issues dated Aug 28.

When it comes to databases, no news is good news. In four months, we’ve not heard of a single problem from our customers who are running Studio Manager on FileMaker 9. Full compatability was expected, but after 4 months even the conservatives among us can feel confident moving ahead with an upgrade.

Especially if you are running FileMaker Server, FileMaker 9 moves things ahead in a safe direction. Server 9 keeps you abreast of data events via email and can notify you every time it verifies a backup or has a problem. Good thing to have in place to protect your precious business data.

FileMaker 9 is looking really good and FileMaker Inc. has spiffed up their website to show it off. We encourage you to explore the site if you are interested in FileMaker 9.

We’ve got conversion advice for you over on our FileMaker Fever blog. And a bit more information on Studio Manager Bulletin.

Preliminary testing shows, as expected, Studio Manager 8 is fully compatible with FileMaker 9. FileMaker Pro 9, FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced were released July 10. Since FileMaker 9 uses the exact same data format underneath the hood, we expected to have full compatability.

We have have had no reports of errors of any kind regarding FileMaker 9 as of 8/19. We have now switched over to using FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced as our daily tool of choice. We highly recommend the software.

We also recommend that you sign up for the Maintenance program that gives you better pricing on future releases in exchange for paying a fixed annual fee. Currently, when you buy a site license or 10 user license as part of a Volume License agreement, you get 1 year of maintenance free.

FileMaker Pro 8 was released on Monday. There is no data format change with 8, so Studio Manager 7 runs perfectly on 8 without modification. If you have Studio Manager 7, you can upgrade to 8 if you like. It’s faster. They’ve eliminated some of the tiny bugs in 7. It has clairvoyance (auto-complete using previously entered values) for any field on a layout that has clairvoyance checked. And you can turn this on by clicking a checkbox for any field in Studio Manager.