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.