Filemaker Pro 4.0 is one of the most user-friendly database programs around, yet it is quite powerful enough for most personal and small-business applications. The main thing it lacks is a graphic display of entity-relationships, but I suspect most databases are not complex enough to require this anyway. Using Filemaker Pro, I have created an enterprise database for my company. I won't go into great technical detail here, but basically I got this great book called The Data Model Resource Book . (Wiley & Sons) It gives you the schemas for creating a database of the kind that is typically used in most organizations. Any professional relational database can be used to implement the models in this book. They also sell a complete SQL version, but I decided to implement it from scracth, so I could adapt it for my needs from the ground up. Their approach to database design is highly “Normalized.” This basically means that you have to deal with splitting your information out into lots of separate files, but then once you’ve done this, you can slice it and dice it in almost any way imaginable.
Here are some of the things I keep track of in Filemaker Pro:
- Recordings and recording sessions
- Songs
- People and organizations
- Correspondence
- Orders, invoicing, inventory, shipments
- Work efforts
- Human resources
I have written scripts in the AppleScript programming language that integrate Filemaker with Eudora for convenient email management.
Outlining as a means of structuring information has been around for centuries. You probably learned it in 5th grade. Software outlining has been incorporated into many popular programs in a limited form. But dedicated outliners can do much more. The best outliner ever was called More 3.1, written by Dave Winer and others. Unfortunately it only ran on Macintosh computers, and worse, it was discontinued several years ago by Semantec. However, and this is the software deal of the decade, Semantec has generously made the old versions available for free download from Outliners.com. If you download it, please don’t ask them for technical help, as the product is still discontinued, so there is no support. If they get hassled, they may stop making it available. But if you like it, do give Semantec your positive feedback and encourage them to re-release it and resume development. The upside is that More 3.1 has remained remarkably resilient to operating system changes, because it was written with very “clean code.” It seems to run fine at least thru MAC OS 8.6.
I highly recommend this program. I have been using it as my main program for all text-oriented productivity applications for over 13 years. You can go from brainstorming an idea to finished presentation quicker in More than in any other program I know of.
Outline math can be used for budgeting--in this application it blows spreadsheets away in my opinion.
For scheduling, things to do, creative writing, song lyrics, business correspondence, research, journaling, the uses go on and on.
With conventional word processors you’re stuck in the trees and you can’t see the forest. With an outliner you can view and edit your information at many different levels of detail, so you can fine-tune the structure more easily than ever before.
Check it out!
I recently purchased a copy of this program, and I love it. They have “ease of use” down to a science. I think this is the easiest-to-use standard music notation program I have ever seen. The manual is excellent, and the scores look beautiful. Sibelius runs on both Mac and Windows. One nice feature is one-key keyboard shortcuts -- a feature that I think is a bit underused on Mac software on general. Sibelius also has a built-in score reading program, but I haven’t checked it out yet. So far, for that, I use SmartScore. Score reading programs allow you to scan printed sheet music and turn it into MIDI files or notation files, where they can then be edited.