Like the rest of you (I presume), I usually come here utilizing a web browser. You know, a piece of software more or less dedicated in purpose to fetching and rendering pages via the hypertext transport protocol (http). Even if it does a couple other things as a sideline (like old Netscape which incorporated an email client).
I’m in here courtesy of a database. eFileMaker Pro 8.5. Yeah, OK, so they tossed in a web rendering engine, so you can display web content in your database screens (and calculate the URLs in part from field contents, you can see how that could be kind of cool). But to tell you the truth I figured it would not “cookie” properly. Would not let me log in. To my surprise, I see Welcome, AHunter3 greeting me when I drag a webportal onto the screen and set it to Straight Dope Message Board - Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks.. (It must be sharing cookie-territory with Shiira somehow…otherwise, how would it know?)
And the links work, and Control-i turns italics on and off and the smilie icons work…
(I just tried right-clicking a link and danged if it didn’t give me the option of opening in a new window. How can it do THAT? Oh, it launches my regular web brower to handle that one. OK, unless you wanted to forego that feature, you couldn’t ditch your regular web browser and just browse from FileMaker.)
I forgot to check to see if it shows previews when I hover over thread titles.
Heck, I wonder if I could integrate my budgeting database with my online banking web site and have the FileMaker fields visible alongside of the web interface?
A lot of applications just use IE’s code when they have to render web stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re just using IE now (or whatever your default browser is), with a spiffy Filemaker skin layered on top.
Well, I don’t have Internet Explorer (which is kind of extince on the Mac). I can’t tell if it’s using WebKit (the underlying rendering engine of both Safari, which is the Apple-supplied browser, and Shiira, which is my default browser) or if FileMaker is rendering natively; I gather WebKit is an open API (hence the existence of Shiira in the first place)…still, the actual WebKit code (if that’s what they’re using) could be incorporated into FmPro rather than FmPro trying to access components installed elsewhere, and my guess is that it is. The “last visited” notation on the top of the page, for instance, doesn’t refresh from a visit by FileMaker, so in some fashion SDMB isn’t recording that I was there, which it would if my regular browser was doing the browsing, so that makes me think FileMaker isn’t just sending Shiira (or Safari) there behind the scenes and doing an OLE-type thing to embed the results in the middle of the FileMaker screen.
The cookies, as I said, are another matter. My guess is that FileMaker is reading from the cookies files of whatever is designated as the current browser, in my case Shiira.
the smilie icons work…