B&b Software has released a suite of Mac applications designed to complement and extend FileMaker Pro. They’re all available for Mac OS 9.2; beta versions for Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”) and higher can be downloaded. The finished OS X applications are due by the end of the month.
The three applications are all made with the REALbasic editing environment from Real Software. They include fmMailmerge, a personal bulk mailer; fmMailscan, which enables the scanning of incoming e-mail messages, the extraction of data and the writing of that data to a FileMaker Pro database; and fmWebtags, which supports the merging of data from FM Pro databases with static Web pages.
fmMailmerge supports the merging of data from FileMaker Pro databases with user defined template letters generating output messages that may be sent via e-mail or fax. It supports the Eudora, Outlook Express, Entourage, PowerMail and Mailsmith, as well as the FAXstf 6 fax application.
With fmMailscan, data may be extracted from any e-mail message field and used to create a new record in a database or to identify an existing record and then to update or delete it. It supports Eudora, Outlook Express, Entourage, and PowerMail.
fmWebtags allows the embedding of custom tags (which point to specific data within a FileMaker Pro database, into Web pages. Once a set of tags have been embedded into a page, it becomes a template which may then be processed later to replace the tags with live data, according to MacTech magazine. The resulting page may then be deployed to the Web server.
The three products cost US$50 each. Site licenses can be obtained for $1,000.