Macworld Forums: Bento 3 - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Bento 3 here

Error. There's a rebate for upgrading users, yo.

True : https://store.filema.../view/group/B3U

A $20 rebate. Mister Mister Battersby, you can scratch a paragraph from your review.

If there were not an upgrade price then this "inexpensive" program would have cost us a hundred and fifty bucks in "just under two years." Quite frankly, $130 is getting to be a bit much.

If you need full design capabilities for labels, you need FileMaker Pro. Bento is FileMaker's entry-level database. FileMaker is still easy to use, but has thousands more features than Bento, along with a whole different level of control, precision, and capability.

As databases go, FileMaker is among the easiest to use of the powerful middleware class of applications. It can be shared over the web, and it can connect to corporate enterprise class databases. It's mature, elegant, and rich in both appearance and capability, and in the right hands, it can be configured to run a small business from one end to the other.

The review originally had an error in regards to a rebate for Bento 1 and Bento 2 owners. This has been corrected. Our apologies for the error.

This should really be part of iWork.

Am I the only one who thinks it's a crippling flaw that Bento won't let you use basic text formatting, like fonts, colors, sizes, and hmm, what else, italics? I must be, because the program is now in its third version and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that italics are missing. I felt seriously cheated after having ponied up the cash for version 1. Now I'm beginning to suspect that this was not a mistake, and in fact no one cares about proper text formatting anymore. Woe is me, the inveterate grump.

This review doesn't shake the impression I've gotten with Bentos 1 & 2, that there's something weird about the product. The Bentos have features I can't grasp having any need for (iPhoto integration), while lacking some that should be part of the 1.0 version any database (label printing & text formatting). On the surface, the product makes no sense.

Has Filemaker itself become weird, or is Bento the product of a secret cabal within the company that nixes any feature that'd make it as handy as Filemaker. It does seem that Bento is targeting the 'boutique' database market: photographers with a strange interest in contemplating each and every photograph a particular customer purchases. Most of use, photographers or not, don't have time for that silliness.

The review does not mention Bento’s support or lack of support for connectivity via Apple Events. Is it scriptable? Does it support Services in Snow Leopard?

sammelmike, on 29 September 2009 - 06:24 AM, said:

And yet, for what it is, you can't really justify putting quotes around the word inexpensive. Any software that you don't need is too expensive, but if Bento's feature set actually has value to you $130 is peanuts for a SOHO DBMS. And then, of course, no one's actually forcing you to upgrade either. If what you have meets your needs, save the $30.

Not only is Bento a fairly crippled, limiting database -- in ways you only truly discover once you're trying to use it in the REAL world rather than on a fast review desktop -- it dings you for rapid updates that are minuscule compared to what other programmers offer. Of course, you won't read all that much about this on the Bento forums, because it's patrollers purge emails they deem too damaging to corporate interests. So let's see if we can say it here: WAY too much update money for what is actually Bento 1.3. As someone who has worked with many databases in 30 years of desktop computing, I can tell you Bento is beautiful and dumb. Invest your data and your time elsewhere.

benroethig, on 29 September 2009 - 06:47 AM, said:

Except, of course, that operationally Apple and FileMaker are distinct entities. The wholly-owned-subsidiary relationship doesn't mean that the parent automatically has free access to all the child's property and resources. That fact is why Claris came into being in the first place.

Also, to be honest, a decent DBMS is a much larger project than any other component of iWork. A good DBMS is a larger project than all of iWork. iWork is a bargain for $50, even while some of its components clearly have room to improve. (I'm looking at you and your formula recalc, Numbers.) Bento is a bargain for $50. iWork plus Bento for less than $100, which is the only reason I can think of that someone would say Bento should be "part of" iWork, would be frankly ridiculous. Any investor paying attention would be complaining like you wouldn't believe, and it's the investors to whom Apple is ultimately answerable.

keybored, on 29 September 2009 - 08:15 AM, said:

The start and end of this message are, to me, the most interesting. Bento is a fairly crippled, limiting database in the eyes of someone who's been using databases for 30 years. I would suggest, as a recovering Oracle DBA and a heavy user of MySQL and FileMaker, that Bento isn't *for* people who can say they've been using DBMS's for decades. It's for mom and for that guy who owns the head shop next town over so they can meet their relatively straightforward organizational needs without the expense/hassle of learning a "real" DBMS, hurting themselves by abusing a spreadsheet or calling you in as an unpaid consultant.

And for that last one, if nothing else, you should be happy Bento exists. No one forces you to use it, but at the same time it's a bit presumptuous to suggest that it can't be the right tool for anyone. It's a $50 DBMS that doesn't require its users to know anything about databases.