I’ve put lots of work into Glom over the last few days. There are a couple of nice new features, needed for (my idea of) version 1.0 completeness. I guess this will be available in Ubuntu (maybe only Dapper) real quick, thanks to Daniel Holbach. It is a little difficult to get all the dependencies when building it yourself.
Found Set
As in FileMaker, you are always looking at either all the records or a set of records based on a Find that you just did. Now there’s visual feedback about this at the bottom-right of the window, and a button to get back to seeing all records.
Quick Find
Whenever I built systems with FileMaker I would always create a big concatenated calculated field for doing quick full-text searches, and I’d make this show up on the Find screens. Glom just gives you this feature for free. There are probably more efficient ways of phrasing the SQL, but that can be improved behind the scenes.
Examples
The glom example now contains example data, including an attractive picture of me in a record in the Contacts table, some made-up products, and some invoices that use them. And now you don’t need to be aware any more of the name of the database on the postgres server. Glom automatically chooses a new database name and associates the new file (created from the example, like a template file.) with the database.
Congrats on reaching/approaching 1.0 some users care about these things and I for one feel a bit safer when developers are confident enough to put 1.0 on their work.
I should probably file bugs reports about this (glom is in gnome bugzilla presumably, I’ll try and file some reports later in the week when I’m not on dialup) but you might want to tweak the menu labels, to use verbs rather than nouns (most software uses verbs, but there are more and more exceptions).
I’d suggest the following:
Tables -> Table
Reports -> Report
Could the two word label “User Level” be replaced by a one word label? (Seems the commonly use View label might be suitable but I’m only judging from screenshots and it might be a bit of a stretch.)
To paraphrase Oscar Wild good developers borrow, great developers steal and I’m sure you have plenty of ideas for the user interface you can embrace and extend from File Maker and existing applications, and subtle tweaks you can make to help meet user expectations.
Looks great.
Best of luck.