We are selling Studio Manager 11 today for new users and Monday for upgraders. We have to update upgrade manuals prior to selling the upgrade.

This version of Studio Manager 11 has all the desktop features of Studio Manager 10 plus adds special layouts and features tailored to the touch interface and screen size of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Normal access from an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad will be via your local area network to FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Server where Studio Manager will reside.

Now that we’ve stopped coding, we have a few more tasks to do. We have been writing the essential instructions for the iPad and iPhone and are part-way through. Keep in mind that most products for iPhone and iPad lack documentation. You’ll get a better manual within the week, but if you want to start using iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with Studio Manager 11, you can start now with the confidence that more thorough instructions are in the works. If the manual fails to provide the information that should be there, we will make extra allowances and provide free support to augment it.

What else is there to do? The first next thing to do is to import our illustrious demo data into the brand new product, and whip up a Studio Manager 11 demo. That’s my next job for the weekend. Unfortunately, it’s harder than we like it to be so it may be Sunday night before the fresh demo is available.

After that, we’ll be loading up the SM11 tab (page) here with screenshots so that you’ll have as much information as possible on the iPhone and iPad layouts and features. It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn every feature of Studio Manager for Desktop onto iPad and iPhone.

Our number one priority is the basic user. We want it to be easy to have a freelancer or employee use an iPad to enter their time and to use an iPhone or iPod touch if that’s all they’ve got. Some will love this opportunity. Don’t forget a copy of FileMaker Go for iPhone and iPod touch is $20 and $40 on iPad. That’s a deal that some will find irresistible compared to the $300 price of FileMaker Pro.

If you have an extra iPad around the office, it could come in handy as an extra FileMaker license with the addition of FileMaker Go.

Traffic Managers and executives will like some of the quick lookup features in Studio Manager 11 that will work even on the iPhone. The iPad is somewhere in between the iPhone and full desktop Studio Manager in functionality. Heavy lifting stays in safe keeping on FileMaker Pro, but lots of data access is there now.

It is possible to put the entire Studio Manager database on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad for travel or mobile use, but for now this will be for special situations as FileMaker Go does not yet support syncing between desktop and mobile devices. We expect that feature to come in time and when it does, we’ll add untethered functionality to what is available today.

Release of Studio Manager 11 is scheduled for Friday, January 7th. Upgraders can purchase on January 10. Take 20% off the prices listed on the Price and Upgrade pages (tabs above). We are very excited about Studio Manager 11′s mobile features and believe you will find it worth the wait.

Contact me personally to place your order or ask questions as I’ll be the one most likely to be working 24/7. We prefer email, but phone works too. Send credit card details – split the number and expiration on 2 or 3 emails. Include exact name and billing address for the card and your company name. Tell me how many users you need.

Our Contact Information including email and phone is here.

The main new features in Studio Manager 11 are iPhone and iPad-related. Information access and input via iPhone and iPad is a big win for creative services businesses like yours. The new FileMaker Go apps at $20 and $40 are amazingly functional. We’ve been blogging previews almost daily and will continue for a while after release.

The free demo is of Studio Manager 11. See the SM11 tab starting Jan 14 to see features summarized there. Right now, check out the recent posts with screenshots above.

Today was the first day I put the entire Studio Manager 11 product in development on my iPad. I had tried moving it on with Dropbox previously and for some reason it didn’t work. Today I tried the standard way to move files onto the iPad – via USB cable in iTunes.

The screenshot shows my iPad selected on the left in iTunes. We are on the Apps tab scrolled down to the file sharing portion with FileMaker Go selected. You can see all the FileMaker files I currently have stored on my iPad. Click the image to see it full-sized.

The first version of Studio Manager that is compatible with iPad and iPhone is conceived as a way to  connect to your Studio Manager 11 database over the local area network or from a remote wi-fi or 3G connection (Wide Area Network).

However, if you are using Studio Manager 11 as a single user, you can move Studio Manager onto your iPad in certain situations such as when traveling without your computer. Keep in mind that FileMaker Go doesn’t sync (at least not yet), so if you move the file to your iPad for a time, Studio Manager 11 on your iPad becomes your active copy of the database. When you want to work on the database from a computer, you’ll need to transfer the file back to your Mac or PC and use it with FileMaker Pro there. Also, keep in mind that we aren’t rebuilding every feature in the iPad version – just a reminder.

As a developer, being able to move a copy of Studio Manager 11 directly onto my iPad is fun and handy as a way for me to test usage scenarios from my iPad running FileMaker Go. It looks great!

Thought you should know. If you have any questions about all this, don’t hesitate to contact me for details.

We have decided to take an extra week before releasing Studio Manager 11. The new date is January 3rd. We wanted to have it in final form prior to the new year, for those of you who want your tax deduction in 2010. Sorry, but quality is at stake and we think you’ll agree that’s crucially important. Please let us know if you need further information to make up your mind prior to January 1 and we’ll answer any questions you have.

Our revised deadline gives us the rest of this holiday week plus the weekend to get Studio Manager 11 just the way we want it before release.

Here’s the Estimates tab in Jobs – our latest addition. We only recently decided to add an Invoices and Estimates tab here. We were thinking of decision-makers.

We are envisioning our Studio Manager customers using Studio Manager 11 on their iPads and iPhones in two primary capacities:

1) To allow users to enter time and expense information into their timesheets and to view and mark tasks done. This includes writing notes as needed.

For some of your staff, an iPad or iPhone plus a copy of FileMaker Go may be all they need to report their time and complete tasks.

2) To allow decision-makers, managers and plain old users to check on the status of jobs, production work and billing.

One of the greatest benefits of Studio Manager is giving you current information to help you complete and manage jobs in progress and also work with your clients while doing so. When clients want to enlarge job scope, change their minds or miss agreed upon deadlines, you are in a position to negotiate and push back if you know what’s been happening and where you are against budget and deadlines.

We are imagining you moving about the office with your mobile devices in hand or pocket. I especially like thinking of the iPad as a clipboard of sorts.

What we are not going to do at this juncture is try to make the smaller iPad and diminutive iPhone version do the heavy lifting of complex updates or creating jobs, estimates or invoices. With their slower processors, these devices won’t perform well when taxed by these more complex operations. You’ll need to return to your desktop or notebook computers and full-strength FileMaker Pro to perform them. We think we’ve struck a balance here that will be amenable.

Customizability Alert. Keep in mind that Studio Manager is customizable in the extreme and since it is based on FileMaker Pro it is easy to customize. So, let’s say you want to allow a certain key employee to run some of the more complex scripts from an iPad or even an iPhone, that’s up to you. You can remove one script step (the Perform Script [Prohibit iPad iPhone Execution]) and voila the script now runs from your iPad. You can then create a nice little button on one of the iPad screens or on a new iPad friendly layout for your power user. Done. You don’t have to follow our rules. We just made them up.

Click to see full screenshot taken from my iPad

If push comes to shove or you just happen to be using your iPad at the moment, you can check task status and pending deadlines from your iPad. This is a feature traffic managers, account execs and owners might appreciate. This screen is still in progress but we will update the screenshot should we appreciably modify it so that you can see what you will get in the product prior to purchase.

We are experimenting with how we want to let you flip through records and see how many are currently in your foundset. In this first iteration, we’ve got the book icon from FileMaker 11 in play at the upper right. It works.

Note. There is an optional lower toolbar available in FileMaker Go. Because it provides access that may over complicate things, take up screen real estate and allow someone to get themselves into trouble if not paying attention, we are turning it off on some screens. But we are putting in a preference and other features to allow that toolbar to display selectively – for some users.

Click to view full size.

If you require a lot of space to enter your time to do things like fill in the task you were working on from a pop-down menu, you’ll have lots of elbow room here. Even though this isn’t polished yet, you’ll notice we are getting lots of functionality in here with big finger-friendly buttons to help you navigate and operate. More will be added here – I’m thinking a save Weekly Timesheet as PDF button might enhance this a bit. We are not trying to do everything here, but want to make an iPad a way to get lots of good stuff done.

Remember that you can add things we choose to omit and omit things we’ve chosen to include. In many cases, a button that works on the larger Mac screens can be transplanted to iPadland with only a few minor adjustments. Buttons, layouts and scripts can be duplicated and then modified rather than starting from scratch. We are available to help if you want something special we haven’t thought of.

The iPad version of the employee dashboard is grouped with other Contacts capabilities. Here’s a rough version of the working dashboard showing the tasks tab. You can see your pending deadlines and mark them done as you progress.

On the Time tab, you’ll be entering today’s time. When you need to look at your previous timesheets, you can tap over to the full Timesheets entry screen to be greeted with the complete set of your timesheets, with the most recent one on top. As usual, there is an iPad-friendly Timesheets List Screen to go along with the Entry Screen.

The second tab above is for clients, vendors and prospects. There you’ll be able to pull up contact details like phone and email addresses and also drill down into client jobs. The iPad version is designed to meet the needs of the Studio Manager end-user who only needs a little bit of Studio Manager’s functionality. It is also designed to meet some of the manager’s needs as well. From an iPad or iPhone, you’ll be able to query Studio Manager’s data.

The bottom of the button bar on the right is where you’ll find the places navigation buttons. Similar to the full-sized version of Studio Manager, you can move around quickly from one data set to another. We thought a lot about what matters most in Studio Manager and focus on these critical elements in the iPad screens.

We’ll be covering the Contacts tab in another post in the next day or two so come back and see what else we’ve got in this new version.

Here is a miniaturized screenshot of the Studio Manager 11 calendar on the iPad. Click the image to see it actual size. Keep in mind that the calendar on the iPad looks even better as we are compressing the image here for the web. Just like you its big brother, the iPad calendar shows you job deadlines in a month view and lets you filter what you see by employee, client and job. Now, imagine yourself accessing the calendar with an iPad…

Keep in mind that this screen is still in production and should be looking similar but better by means of the tiny refinements that make all the difference.

Email PDFs. You can save and email PDFs from your iPad. Plan on filtering the calendar as you wish and then pressing the Save/Send PDF link in the button bar to immediately get a draft email with the PDF attached. You can customize the PDF version of the calendar to your graphic standards as usual. Click to view this second screenshot at actual size.

When you press the Save/Send PDF button, you get an email with PDF attached waiting for you to fill in the To and Subject lines. It looks like this on my iPad (only larger). We expect that FileMaker Go will support actual printing one of these days. No announcement yet, but we are hoping it will be soon. Luckily, most of us don’t print like we used to.

The calendar for iPhone showing tasks due is coming together nicely. Yay! Inspired by the built-in calendar for iPhone. The difference is that it shows what’s due for the user on a given day and integrates with the full-blown Studio Manager system in your office.

Touch a day to see the tasks due that day. Tap a task to drill down to the details. We will probably make it so a day with overdue tasks in it has a red bullet, due tasks a black bullet and done tasks a gray bullet.

It’s thoroughly customizable and extensible. We’re sure you can make it look even better. Want to design the UI of your own iPhone app? We’ve given you a nice headstart, but don’t settle for our version.

We’ll show something for iPad next most likely. Come back tomorrow for another brief preview.

As we speak, we are working hard on adding iPhone and iPad access to Studio Manager 11 — our upcoming release. We are adding layouts to Studio Manager 11 that are iPhone- and iPad-friendly.

To access Studio Manager 11 from an iPhone, you’ll need to purchase the $20 FileMaker Go app. The iPad version of FileMaker Go will run you $40. Considering the much higher cost of FileMaker Pro on a Mac or PC, these prices are a steal!

When you login from an iPhone or iPad in Studio Manager 11, you’ll be dropped off at a layout that fits your screen size and works well by touch.

Above is the first version of a home screen for the iPhone. We are experimenting. As you probably know, when you are designing something, you really don’t know where you will end up. We are trying things and seeing what works. More will be revealed, I’m sure.

We are focusing first on user functions for recording time, expenses and task completion. We hope to add some capacities for staff, traffic managers and executives who need to see what’s happening or look up some information while on the go.

If you are interested in iPhone or iPad access to our Studio Manager product for creative services businesses, please comment here or send an email to me with your thoughts and desires. What would you like to be able to do?

Besides this first effort to make the full Studio Manager product iPhone- and iPad-friendly, we are thinking about a smaller product that would primarily operate offline on an iPhone or iPad so you don’t have to worry about being connected to the mothership all the time and can get better performance when your connectivity is compromised to one extent or another. Again, your input is most appreciated. Don’t be shy.