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 Bento - 2.0v4Personal database for Leopard users. |
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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:
- Addresses performance issues for several key tasks, including launching the application, selecting the Address Book library, searching the Address Book library, deleting records or entire libraries.
- Provides compatibility with Bento for iPhone and iPod touch: This update includes the ability to synchronize your Bento 2 for Mac data with the newly released Bento for iPhone and iPod touch - sold separately on the iTunes App Store.
- Provides compatibility with iWork Numbers 09.
- Resolves an issue related to displaying addresses in Japanese.
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:
Screenshots:
Download Links:
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Feedback Summary:
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| Overall Rating: | Not rated (0.0) | Features: | Not rated (0.0) | Support: | Not rated (0.0) |
| Ease of Use: | Not rated (0.0) | Quality / Stability: | Not rated (0.0) | Price: | Not rated (0.0) |
Key to Types of Feedback:
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Featured Reviews
Further limitations - Version: 2.0v4, 5/6/2009 03:22AM PST
(2 of 2 users found this comment useful)
NickCollingridge
A Great Beginning 
- Version: 2.0v4, 5/5/2009 10:20AM PST
(5 of 5 users found this comment useful)
jimmy-d
Bento 2 is the best solution for easily creating templates and designing a beautiful database. It is very visually attractive. It works with pictures far better than Filemaker 10, but still needs some improvements like being able to see a larger version of the placed picture. Undo's after typing data into a field are possible, unlike Filemaker 10 that has no undos after pressing enter and is awkward and slow for design. It is a lot easier to work with data in the new spreadsheet view.
I really wish Bento was the solution for me, especially now that there is an iPhone version, but the lack of files and passwords are a dealbreaker. It stores all data in a package somewhere on the hard drive. Not having individual files prevents me from sharing databases with family and friends, or sharing between my desktop and laptop. Yes, I can export the data as an unformatted text file, reimport and reformat every time I want to share every database file. This however is not an ideal or easy solution. Or, you can backup all of your Bento libraries as one file and completely overwrite the second computer's Bento data. Thus, no data can easily be shared without both computers being identical. Not very practical for families or friends who need to share data, or if you have a laptop and want to copy one database to it.
Speaking with Filemaker representatives, I was told the reason Bento doesn't use files is make it easy for home users, as if the concept of files is too complicated for the average person. That and because it ties into your Home folder, would make it challenging to have files and they want to differentiate it from Filemaker. Challenging or not, files are essential.
Filemaker developers also shared hopes that the ease of use in Bento would come to Filemaker. Maybe someday we’ll all have a database that is both powerful and easy to use.
I really wish Bento was the solution for me, especially now that there is an iPhone version, but the lack of files and passwords are a dealbreaker. It stores all data in a package somewhere on the hard drive. Not having individual files prevents me from sharing databases with family and friends, or sharing between my desktop and laptop. Yes, I can export the data as an unformatted text file, reimport and reformat every time I want to share every database file. This however is not an ideal or easy solution. Or, you can backup all of your Bento libraries as one file and completely overwrite the second computer's Bento data. Thus, no data can easily be shared without both computers being identical. Not very practical for families or friends who need to share data, or if you have a laptop and want to copy one database to it.
Speaking with Filemaker representatives, I was told the reason Bento doesn't use files is make it easy for home users, as if the concept of files is too complicated for the average person. That and because it ties into your Home folder, would make it challenging to have files and they want to differentiate it from Filemaker. Challenging or not, files are essential.
Filemaker developers also shared hopes that the ease of use in Bento would come to Filemaker. Maybe someday we’ll all have a database that is both powerful and easy to use.
Most Recent Replies: View All 1 Replies
- TOO limited
Finally - Version: 2.0v4, 5/5/2009 07:23AM PST
(3 of 3 users found this comment useful)
Popeye
Bento has finally come of ages. Adding the iPhone (iPod Touch) application now makes Bento a must have. There's always room for improvements but Bento is finally an extremely useful product. I've used FileMaker Pro for years but now in retirement I don't need all the bells and whistles. Bento is the answer and will always just get better. Nice job FileMaker.
1. Apparently no ability to style text at all. Why can't I make some fields Bold or Italic? This is SO basic it's not true! And it's not as if keeping it simple is a defence for this - it's such a basic feature that no-one could be confused by it, and it's the type of thing that you don't have to use if you don't want to.
2. No calculations - at all! For example I have the requirement to calculate the yearly rent payable from the monthly rent for a property, but Bento can't even do this. I also can't set a field to be a total of a range of records (although to be fair there is the summary function, but it is very inflexible).
Filemaker need to get the balance right between being easy-to-use (which by and large they have successfuly done) and being underpowered to be useful. At present it is the latter which characteristic which sadly predominates.