Bento: Big On Ease, Style & Stretch

Bento

FileMaker’s new personal database, Bento is big on style and ease. Watch the tutorial movie and in less than five minutes you will be comfortable using Bento’s main features.

Bento comes with a set of libraries (databases) that relate directly to OS X’s Address Book and iCal. Whatever changes you make in these Bento libraries — called, not surprisingly, Address Book, iCal Events and iCal Tasks — appear in OS X’s Address Book or iCal and vice versa.

When you install Bento, it imports your Address Book and iCal data, recognizes what Address groups you’ve created and calls them Collections that have their own icon in the Source List.

And by creating additional libraries of your own and using Bento’s relational fields, you can extend OS X’s functionality: the organizational world you create in Bento will interrelate with and stretch the features of Address Book, iCal, Numbers and Keynote. And you can view it all with one swift glance at the Source List (Bento’s left-hand panel).

The price is easy too, $49 for a single-user license, $99 for a family license — five license keys for use on different computers in the same household.

You can test it free for 30 days. (Note: Bento only works with Leopard.)

Drag And Drop Relating

The power of Bento is in its Relational Fields. To create a relational field, you can use the menu command for creating a new field or you can drag a library icon from the Source List onto the form in a new Library.

An Example: A New Library With A Relational Field

In the example below, I created a new library and called it Short Story Submissions. I exported a Numbers spreadsheet as a CSV file and used Bento’s Import command to populate the library.
Bento

By the way, you can quickly change Bento’s view on your screen, showing or hiding one or both side panels by using the view button in the lower right-hand corner or by using keyboard shortcuts:

  • Command +1 shows all three panels — Source List, Records, Field List
  • Command + 2 shows Source + Records
  • Command + 3 shows Records + Fields
  • Command + 4 shows Records only

After importing my data, I created another form and called it Detail. Once I had chosen a theme and layout, I dragged the iCal Tasks icon from the Source List onto the form to create my relational field.
Bento

Then I customized it by choosing a few fields for the new field (see right-hand column). Now when I thumb through the detail of each record, I can add a task if I wish and the task shows up in Bento’s iCal Tasks as well as in OS X’s iCal.

Alternatively, I can add Tasks directly from iCal Tasks, my relational source, by clicking on the Add Related Records button in the lower left-hand corner of the field.
Bento

Here are the tasks as they appear in OS X’s iCal:
Bento

If you are looking an easy way to interrelate projects or your personal or business life with each other, I recommend Bento.

What I Like

  • The Price. It does a lot for the money.
  • Ease of use. It’s intuitive and the online tutorial consists of quick and colorful movies, each one taking less than five minutes. After watching them you’ll be ready to start using the program.
  • Themes. With Bento, layout is a snap. It comes with an attractive set of themes. One click on a Theme (preset background colors and fonts) and you change the overall look of a Collection. The theme carries over into all forms. The ability to create and change database layout is a hallmark of FileMaker, going back to the 1980s and the early days of FileMaker by Claris Works — at that time part of Apple — when it was the only database that allowed users to add and arrange fields in a form.
  • Seamless flow of data to and from OS X’s Address Book and iCal. And with the “Related Records List” field you can flow the data from any of the other Libraries in Bento to iCal and Address Book. (See How To Use Relational Fields, above.)
  • Source List Panel. Ability to view icons of all my databases at once in the Source List — hence the name, a reference to the Japanese Bento box with food arranged in compartments.

What I’d Like To See In Future Versions

  • Smart Quotes.
  • Themes that carry over from Collections into the Library.
  • More font, leading and kerning choices. A link to Apple’s text formatting box would be ideal. Or an Inspector.
  • An option to make completed events invisible in (Bento’s) iCal Events without deleting them in iCal.

System Requirements

  • Mac OS X Leopard
  • Intel Mac or Power PC G4 or G5 processor running at 867 MHz or faster 512MB RAM. 1GB recommended
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