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Mac OS X  |  Business / Productivity  |  Contact Management / CRM  |  Bento

Bento

Bento - 1.0v2

personal database for Leopard users

All Time: (2.9)
This Version: (2.3)
Current Version: 1.0v2
Release Date: 2008-02-13
License: Update
Downloads (this version): 6,014
Downloads (all versions): 10,987
Price: $49

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Product Description:

Bento is designed to help Mac users organize their lives by giving them one place to put their important information, from contacts and calendars to projects and events. Bento can organize activities related to work, home, school and community. Bento automatically displays contacts and calendars kept within Address Book and iCal. There is no need to re-enter existing names, phone numbers, email addresses and upcoming events into Bento so users can start organizing and extending to their information right away. Bento users can organize contacts, calendars, photos and files so they can easily do the following and more: Manage a vast amount of contact details Coordinate events, parties and fundraisers Track projects, assignments and deadlines Connect related information together Prioritize tasks Catalog inventory, donations and items for sale Record hours worked and payments due Assign ratings to service providers and sellers Create libraries for music, movies and other media Store files and photos in relation to projects and events Bento builds on Leopards gorgeous new look and consistent design to bring simplicity and style to personal databases. Key features include: Built-in links to Address Book and iCal. Be productive instantly by integrating and adding to your contact and calendar information. Add photos to your contacts, add invitees to an iCal event, and more. And because Bento links with Address Book and iCal, you can see data on your iPhone or share it over the Web with .Mac. Stylish templates and themes. More than 20 ready-to-use templates sport elegant themes to reflect each user's unique style, personality or activity. Forms and fields are designed with coordinated colors, layouts, fonts and text styles for immediate use. Works with iPhone and .Mac. Bento links to live Address Book and iCal data. No synchronization is necessary to be in sync with Bento, since Apple's core technology takes the information to iPhone and .Mac for sharing over the Web. iTunes-like search. Searching, organizing and sorting records is simple. Create collections to store work, personal or volunteer tasks in the same way you would create smart playlists in iTunes or albums in iPhoto. Drag, drop and import with ease. Rearranging, regrouping and viewing lists or forms are drag-and-drop easy, as is importing or exporting data from Microsoft Excel, Numbers or any other program that creates CSV files. See things your way. One-click customization options for themes, columns displayed, label positions, text sizes, shading, and alignment; the Table View allows for easy sorting and quick stats in Summary Row; Add more pages to view different slices of information. Get the Leopard experience. Users will love many of the exciting new Leopard capabilities in Bento, including: Media Manager, which allows users to store and change images in Bento fields; live connection to iCal, which exchanges data between calendars and tasks; Advanced Find, which re-uses the Advanced Find module from Leopard Finder for pinpointing specific information within the database; and Time Machine, the new Leopard feature that allows for easy database back-ups. Bento by FileMaker Bento is brought to you by FileMaker, and it takes advantage of the company20 years of database software experience. FileMaker, Inc., makers of the legendary FileMaker Pro, one of the world's easiest to use full-featured databases, now brings you a personal database with virtually a zero learning curve.

What's new in this version:

Replaces previous versions of the software, including the Bento preview software. This new version of Bento includes support for additional languages, improvements to overall stability, and is compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard)

Operating System Requirements:

This product is designed to run on the following operating systems:

  • Mac OS X 10.5 Intel
  • Mac OS X 10.5 PPC

Additional Requirements:

  • Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4
    867 MHz or faster processor
    512MB of RAM; 1GB recommended
    Leverages (and requires) Leopard

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Download Links:

Your Installed Versions:


 

Feedback Summary:

This Version:
Overall Rating: (2.3) Features: (2.4) Support: (2.1)
Ease of Use: (2.7) Quality / Stability: (3.1) Price: (2.9)
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Bento ReviewA bunch of marketing, but not much of a product - Version: 1.0v2, 8/19/2008 03:55PM PST

(0 of 1 users found this comment useful)

reasthope2
I'm disappointed with Bento. Its not even worth taking the time to list my frustrations. I would have expected more from Filemaker
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Bento ReviewData Protection? Forget about it. - Version: 1.0v2, 8/14/2008 03:31AM PST

Shark Attack Design
I had hoped that Bento would be a suitable receptacle for my marketing data, which runs to several thousand names and addresses but which is not complex enough to require the whistles and bells of FileMaker Pro (nor its complex interface). Clearly - in the UK at least - this data falls under the scope of the Data Protection Act, which requires suitable protection to be applied to the information; a common enough requirement, I think, even for small databases. So I am extremely surprised that Bento is a database program with no ability to protect/encrypt its database.

The support forums, in the face of a deluge of requests from users for this exact feature, acknowledge as much with vague talk of "forwarding the comments to the development department", but those comments are fairly old now and nothing has happened as far as I can tell. Certainly I just checked on VT to see if I'd missed an upgrade announcement, but no.

As long as Bento's database (note the singular: I'm /not/ a fan of the app's policy of lumping everything into one database) cannot be encrypted then it becomes useless for many small businesses for whom it might otherwise be a good solution to modest database needs. You don't have to be a big corporation to be affected by Data Protection legislation, after all.

Perhaps simply ensuring that the user's log-in password is required at startup, upon waking from sleep, and when emerging from screensaver would be enough to comply with the law. But that feels like the barest minimum to me, and I would like to think that I owe it to those people whose data I hold on my laptop to do more than minimum legal compliance.

Incidentally, I did try putting the bento database file into an encrypted disk image and placing an alias to the db file back in its original location (~/Library/Application support/Bento/). Open the DMG file, launch Bento... nope, Bento won't launch. So even that workaround is blocked.

Fix this matter of db encryption, otherwise Bento is destined to remain as just so much eye candy wrapped around only the most trivial of data.

If you don't need to protect your data (?!) then it's a nice interface, I guess.
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Bento ReviewBeta at best, more like vaporware - Version: 1.0v2, 8/6/2008 04:50PM PST

Jim Delany
Bought it in January thinking it was promising. Sure feel like an idiot now.

Project seems to have been abandoned, other than heavy marketing. It was gravely flawed when it came out and the user support forum has the same apologies and vague promises it had 6 months ago.

Lacks the most basic features. For example there is only one database file, and it has to be at a very specific place, inside ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Bento/. The File menu doesn't even have an Open command.

Save your money
Jim

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