FileMaker ships Bento personal database software
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 8, 2008 at 10:46am
FileMaker Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, has released Bento, a US$49 personal database, after a period of beta testing. Designed specifically for Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), Bento lets you organize contacts, calendars, projects, events, and more – all in one place.
Bento is designed to complement iWork (as well as other Apple software). With the software, you can drag and drop or point and click to change the look of any form, and see information in a way that makes sense to you, Rosenberg says. You can customize fonts, fields, colors, columns, shading and more.
Bento takes advantage of many of the new features of Leopard, including live linking to iCal data, core animation, advanced find, Time Machine backups, and multimedia features. With the software you can do things like: manage virtually unlimited contact details; coordinate events, parties, and fundraisers; track projects, assignments and deadlines; connect related information together to see more details; prioritize things that need to get done; 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 media; and store files and photos related to projects and events
The “Macsimum MWSF 2007 Coupon Book” is available for download. You can find it here and print it as a PDF. It has discounts, special offers and promotions in conjunction with the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
kevin Says:
The big deal is that its consumer-friendly, useful, and cheap. Most consumers, freelancers, etc, wouldn’t pay for FMP even though they could benefit from using a database, and this can be an entry point if there’s an upgrade path (or discount maybe to FMP?). Imagine that someone has been using OmniOutliner to track projects… this would be a big step up for a small price.
Posted on January 08, 2008
lantzn Says:
Would this product be a sufficient replacement for the Appleworks 6 database module? If so Apple should bundle this into iWorks.
I own iWorks and hate having to rely on Appleworks for my database needs.
Posted on January 17, 2008
lantzn Says:
p.s. Typo, that should be MWSF 2008 Coupon Book.
Posted on January 17, 2008
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Jarod Says:
I really dont get the big deal about this Bento app. It’s way more confusing and cumbersome to use than the built-in templates that come with filemaker. Filemaker should really be focusing on modernizing its Business Productivity Suite by perhaps adding a payment module. That would certainly be more useful than an app that has 1 gazillion apps that do the same thing.
Posted on January 08, 2008