Bento: Personal Database Software for Mac Users
Filemaker has released a public beta of Bento, a simple database solution for keeping track of anything you like. John Gruber has already had some excellent input that helps establish Bento as the perfect organization tool for Mac OS X and iLife/iWork lovers. We absolutely loved it, too. However, we do have some concerns that we’ve already shared on the Bento forum:
- There doesn’t appear to be a way to turn off or customize the somewhat cheesy themes that are built into Bento. Even starting with a supposedly “blank” record form simply gives you a themed view with no fields. You can’t even resize the massive text fields that the app uses by default. We think this will be a much-requested feature.
- The print options are weak at best. Bento simply lets you print the exact same record view as on the screen. While it does allow you to un-check a box to turn off the background, that’s the only option. For instance, the boxes around fields will print. Since we view Bento as an easy way for freelancers and small studios to customize their record keeping, it would be nice to print good looking invoices. There should be a choice between well-designed templates and using your own.
- While creating a simple time billing form, we noticed that the Duration field type uses seconds when used in an equation. While this was somewhat easy to fix with simple division, the app should give you the option of using hours, minutes, etc. when that field type is used in calculations.
- We’d like to see a way to sync between Macs (without .Mac). A popular purpose for the software would be project management of any kind, so multi-user ability - at least locally - would be outstanding.
- Though they are easily turned off, the animations (which are on by default) seem to serve little purpose than to shock the user awake (or to show off Core Animation in Leopard).
We had to really try to find that much that we didn’t like! Bento is an excellent product that focuses on the same kind of details that make most Apple software titles a joy to use. For instance, if you enter 90m in a Duration field, it is auto-converted to 1h 30m. The application is tightly integrated by default with Address Book and iCal, giving you easy access to your contacts at all times. You can even use Bento to define new fields you’d like to track in Address Book. Every main set of data, called a Library, is accessible by every other Library. That makes it easy to create a contact/project/invoicing/payables management system in a single window. We can’t wait for the full version.
Filed under: Manage Your Time, Software
