You may have seen the video from Claris Inc. about their recent Claris Platform Vision 2021 webinar. Watch it on YouTube.

From the webinar, you can learn their development plans around their Claris products, improvements to FileMaker Pro & Server.

Relative to MBS FileMaker Plugin are a few highlights:

• Claris works on support for Apple M1 and future Apple Silicon Macs. Exact date not given, but it may be later in 2021. We will try to support this as soon as we get a new plugin SDK with Apple Silicon support. Actually we were ready in July 2020 and a few weeks ago built it: MBS FileMaker Plugin for Apple Silicon
• For Windows, Claris works on integrating WebView2 engine from Microsoft Edge into the product. The engine is based on Chrome project and much better than what we have with Internet Explorer. Once the change is done, you may enjoy newer JavaScript, HTML 5 and better CSS support in the web viewer. When this change happens, all existing WebView functions in our plugin will stop working on Windows. For us this will be a rewrite like the one from WebKit 1 to version 2 in FileMaker 16. But it is not clear as of today when we can support the newer web viewers at all. We played with WebView2 already and added them to our Xojo plugins.
• There was no announcement so far about enhancements to the plugin SDK. We would like to see more there, like loading plugins into the Data API process to use it in scripts triggered via Data API.
• There was also no announcements on the FileMaker iOS SDK. This SDK allows advanced FileMaker developers to build custom branded iOS apps, which replace FileMaker Go with a more tailored experience. For example you can provide a local database pre-installed and opening automatically. It can connect to the server for the company and be used without ever entering the server URL and credentials.
• In several places Claris mentioned to work on Android. But details are missing whether there will be a ready to use FileMaker Go for Android. If not, everyone my need to use SDK with Android build tools to make a custom application. And unclear is whether we can provide plugins somehow. Read more about our thoughts and fears on FileMaker and Android.
• Claris is aware of the changes with CentOS distribution. If they choose a different Linux distribution or do something different like VM containers, we may need to adjust the plugin to the new environment.

As with all changes coming, this may require you to update your MBS FileMaker Plugin. If needed also update the license to cover newer version.

Beside those we look forward to more news from Claris, especially on the upcoming conference in October.
Let me know if I missed a fact somewhere.