We’ve been using FileMaker 11 with Studio Manager 10 every day since FileMaker 11 was released in mid March. Initially we were a bit reticent to give a full go ahead in case a new feature or change in FileMaker might conflict in some way with Studio Manager. But, things are going very well, so feel free to upgrade one or more of your client machines to FileMaker 11.

What about earlier versions of Studio Manager and FileMaker 11? Glad you asked. The only hitch is that Studio Manager 8 and 9 don’t know about FileMaker 11, so you’ll need to have me do a quick modification to the startup script for you. I’ve been charging $50 for the change. These days we are using the excellent Dropbox online service + application to share files. We’ll edit your file and return it to you in a jiffy. Contact us by email to schedule your upgrade.

We are currently busy at work on a minor upgrade: Studio Manager 10.1 that will boost your use of new features in Filemaker Pro 11 should you choose to upgrade. We started by reformatting the underlined “links” to improve the look of these buttons. FileMaker 11’s user interface is based on Cocoa now and text handling is different – scrunching the text vertically which makes underlined text look cramped. We found through experimentation that you can simply increase the height of single line text box by a pixel to eliminate the issue. Anyway, we went through all of Studio Manager 10 and have increased heights of text blocks everywhere to eliminate that minor font display glitch.

FileMaker 11 lets us add charts. When you’ve lived with a product for as many years as we have and been prohibited from charting, your mind draws a blank at first. After stalling on this initially, we are coming up with some good ideas and will not only include a few chart drawing buttons in our upcoming Studio Manager 10.1 release but will blog about it.

Charts are very easy to add. You don’t have to wait for Studio Manager 10.1 to be released. If you have FileMaker 11 on any of your machines, feel free to create some charts for important data. If you try your hand at a Studio Manager chart of any kind, drop me a line and I’ll be glad to help. I’ll provide a little free support for you so I can learn too.

Also, we are long overdue for a new Studio Manager demo, so plan to release the SM 10.1 demo very shortly after the release of Studio Manager 10.1. If you have ideas for us or things you would like to see in Studio Manager or questions about anything, please let me know.

Contact me at this email address.

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.

Studio Manager 10 is available for purchase today. See our in-progress Studio Manager 10 tab above for more details plus about 10 blog posts below for details about some of the new features.

We are working furiously to have the Studio Manager 10 demo ready for download some time today. Just click the demo tab for more information and a download link.

It will help us keep in touch and know what’s going on if you fill out the contact information form there. But if you are already on our mailing list and don’t want to bother, you can type x’s or dashes through the required fields and still get the free demo and/or documentation. Our favorite field for you to fill in correctly is the email address. But please, suit yourself.

We are listing our regular prices on the Pricing and Upgrades tabs above, but please apply a 25% discount to what you see for the number of users you need if you plan on purchasing by December 31st!

To purchase now, just email your card details split between 2 emails for luck along with your basic contact information. Calling too for emphasis is always good – just leave a voicemail. You can leave your card details on voice mail if you prefer. The phone is in a secure location. Leave your phone if you don’t mind in case we have a question for you. We do need your exact name on the card and expiration.

FileMaker 10 has this fabulous new user-modifiable tool bar the way other modern programs do. The only issue is that it takes up a whole bunch of height that used to be available for the database screen on smaller screens like the 13 inch Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. We love the new tool bar but it ruins Studio Manager’s aspect ratio.

Until now. We did the large amount of work to not only widen all of Studio Manager’s entry screens, prompts and list views to make up for what got lost in height, but we re-designed everything to use the space well. Designers know how long this takes. Thank Scout for most of this re-design work. She spent many, many hours doing one screen at a time. There are over 50 screens in all. Thanks Scout!

You’ll need to click to see the above shrunken screen shot clearly. It opens in a separate window or tab so that you can switch back and forther between the screen shot and this description. If you control- or right-click, you can choose new tab or window.

When it comes time to bill a client, sometimes you need to hold some of the work until something deliverable shows up for the customer. It is a sort of value-billing. Don’t bill them until they see something good, at least don’t blow them away before they are seeing value. Something along those lines.

So, in Studio Manager 10, you can temporarily put items on hold and also designate them as unbillable before you throw the switch and have Studio Manager create a still editable bill for you from actual time and expenses. Of course time is billed at your billing rate and expenses are marked up to cover the risk you take when buying things on behalf of your client.

Notice that items with a billing status of “on hold” turn orange and “unbillable” items turn red. “Billed” items turn green and regular not-yet-billed items are black. You don’t need to fill in the billing status except when you want to designate something as “on hold” or “unbillable”. Otherwise, time and expenses start their lives with a blank billing status and that status changes to billed automatically when they are billed.

In Studio Manager 10, your employees and freelancers can be assigned to jobs so that they can track the jobs they have on their plate as well as the tasks they’ve been personally assigned. We have a nice little assignment screen shown below (click to enlarge) that makes assigning people a snap.

Now you can view who is on a job from the Jobs home screen. When people fill in timesheets, only their jobs appear as options rather than the full list of all active jobs. And when you assign people to tasks, only those assigned to the job populate the value list.

With FileMaker 10’s script triggers, we can make Studio Manager 10 more responsive. On the Contacts table view, we give you a way to filter your Contacts by company or name. In the above example, I typed “jo” into the Filter by Full Name box and instantly my list shrank to 4 people. Saves a lot of typing without ever bothering to bring up the Find dialog and submitting an official find.

Just a little thing, but we got the idea from Address Book. Why show all the address fields all the time in Contacts? In Studio Manager 10, click the summary pane and you’ll get to the edit tab in one click. This will keep idle hands and minds from inadvertently editing data and gives a cleaner look.

Now you get 4 slots for assigning employees and freelancers to tasks instead of just one. This becomes an advantage when you want someone who plays a lesser role, perhaps just oversight, to see the task in their personal task list.

We still like the idea of  designating a single person responsible for a task. You can get that effect by making the person in slot #1 the task lead when there is a hierarchy, even if only in seniority.

We are sticking with the #1 slot initials in all our reports because we think listing 4 initials in front of a task name would clutter the message. The main purpose of the 4 slots is to give each person a full list of the tasks they need to work on.

In the monthly calendar and week views of tasks, when you hover over a task you get the full names of all of the people assigned to the task. And, you can modify who is on a task at any time.

When you click on the thin bar at the left of a week in the monthly calendar view, you are shown a week view. Even though we’ve cropped this shot, you’ll get the full screen height for a total of 12 possible tasks due on any given day. We made Sunday and Saturday skinnier to give you more room for week days. Like on the month calendar view, you can hover over a task to see the details and click a task to edit it. Click to see full-sized. See Month View.