Simpler workaround for non-US FileMaker woes? [UPDATED]

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 30 October 2007 12:12

Business IT - Technology

English-speaking users of FileMaker Pro 9 outside the US are unhappy about a compatibility issue that stops the program running on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

  FileMaker plans to release a patch on November 19, but for now the company says that each language version of the software will only work under Leopard if the Formats tab in the International system preference is set to a particular country for that language.

So the English version of FileMaker only works with US formats, French with France, and so on.

A workaround for users in English-speaking regions outside the US is to set Formats to United States, but that causes issues with various other programs regarding date sort order, currency symbols and so on.

According to a report received by iTWire from an Australian FileMaker user, there is a more convenient workaround.

In the Input Menu tab of the International system preference, check the box labelled "Show input menu in menu bar", and in the list of keyboard layouts  check the US layout as well as Australian and any others that are required.

If the input (aka 'flag' menu) is then used to select the US keyboard, FileMaker will run successfully. That's what we are told, anyway - iTWire is not in a position to verify that this works, but it is extremely unlikely to cause any serious problems for Australian users, as the two keyboard layouts are practically (if not exactly) identical. The advantage is that other setting such as date formats are unaffected. If there are any issues with other applications, it's easy to switch back to the Australian format.

British users will see some differences in the keyboard layout, especially with # and £.

These workarounds still leave the incompatibility between FileMaker's Instant Web Publishing feature and Mac OS X 10.5, which presumably will be fixed in next month's update.

What does FileMaker say? Please read on for a senior executive's comments.