FileMaker Pro's big selling point is that it's an easy way to create powerful relational databases and attractive front-ends for working with these databases. With a little effort, you can create flexible systems for running whole businesses, managing invoicing and human resources, and all a lot more quickly than you could rustle up the scripted web pages you'd need to work with MySQL, for example.

Once upon a time, FileMaker (or Claris, as it was called back then) used to do big releases of FileMaker Pro. These were infrequent and each time there was an extraordinary number of new features.

Version 7 of FileMaker Pro was probably the last release that could be called big: version 8 was a series of small but important usability improvements, while 8.5 was little more than a paid-for universal binary upgrade with a couple of extra features thrown in. Unfortunately for most users, version 9 is another of these iterative releases; its new features are welcome but not monumental.

New faces

FileMaker has two big communities to please: the professional database developers who need powerful features for generating databases and integrating them with enterprise systems; and the talented amateurs who just want to create something that's easy to use with the minimum of fuss.

Version 9 has two new main features for the everyday user: conditional formatting and self-adjusting layouts. Conditional formatting lets you change the way an item on a database layout looks depending on certain conditions.

You can alter font, colour, size and various other attributes - handy for making a field go red if your client goes into the red, for example. It's very easy to create these formatting conditions using the iTunes-esque pull-down menus - so easy, in fact, FileMaker would do well to transfer this approach to things such as the calculation field definitions section.

Self-adjusting layouts are another good idea. Before, whenever you put a field down on a FileMaker layout, you had to make it as big as it would ever need to be. If you underestimated, your data would be squished into whatever size you'd allocated.

Now, whenever you drop a field onto your layout, the Info palette gives you the option to make the field auto-adjust in any direction, so if there's more space available with the current window size, the field will expand to fill it.