Real World Bento: the formidable, personal database

I am a co-owner of small delivery service in Boston. I tried Bento few months back for my business, and again with the introduction of their iPhone App. But ran into so many problems, recently started using Excel spreadsheet with a new iPhone app "Database Viewer Plus". My drivers can update the delivery status and I can schedule pickups and have it updated to them over the air, so they don't have to phone in. The company also make similar software for Blackberry and Palms but have't tried that yet.

I bought Bento 1.0 and was very disappointed, and hoping FileMaker would addresses Bento's shortcomings in future Bento releases. Not only did they fail to do that, there was no good price for an upgrade to 2.0. Here's what I wrote in my review of 1.0 on Amazon,and the criticism applies to 2.0, as well:

Bento promises interoperability with Address Book and Calendar, but it is not complete field-for-field interoperability. For example, let's say you have images and photographs in your Mac Address Book. You expect the images to show up in Bento, just like the address and phone information. Wrong! Bento expects you to re-import every image into Bento. I have thousands of photos in my Address Book, and it would take hours to do this.

Bento is based on the Filemaker database, so you would expect users to be able to link one person in a contact record to any number of other people. Wrong again! While Outlook supports this very useful feature, neither Address Book nor Bento can empower you to do this. This is a significant shortcoming, as users tend to remember people and events by recalling other people at an event. For example, you remember you met a certain person through David Smith, but you can't remember her name. But if you had her linked to David in your database you could easily find her -- and if her picture happened to be in that record, even better! Similarly, you should be able to link calendar events to people. Outlook users who use these feature come to love them, and it's also one reason why Chapura software's KeySuite for Outlook Synchronization program is so popular on the Palm -- it supports all these Outlook features that out-of-the-box Palm Contacts does not. The Mac world would greatly benefit from both desktop and iPhone software that did this. We would be smarter and more productive!

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This isn't a criticism specific to Megan, but I've noticed a trend in reviews on TUAW where the author goes through some kind of personal transformation around a piece of software being reviewed. In this case, it's not even a review but instead we're being told just to consider Bento. Just think about using it. You know, nudge nudge.

And it's getting old. These are sounding more and more like cloaked endorsements without basis and without backing facts. We don't need the journal of a personal growth to get the value of an app under review. I think there are still reviews at TUAW that are fair and level criticism when due, but this is just a puff-piece on Bento, and it raises suspicions at one of my favorite sites, I'm sad to say.

I will never use something like this on a day to day basis.

I looked into Bento & decided not to buy it because of their flawed approach to printing mailing labels. Your data has to be pulled from Bento and put into Contacts to format the label. So all of a sudden I had personal & business contacts all mixed up. If they would ever come up with a simple solution to printing labels from a Bento db without jumping through several hoops I would buy it.

Bento will not work until you can import XML, and have some sort of basic SQL access.

What does one do if they have a set of data that gets updated from another program? There is really no way to merge it in to Bento and keep what you have already linked relinked into the new file. At least in what I have seen.

Love the bento lunches as art.

Anyone have any success making a "Patient Tracker" template? I downloaded the trial version and was tinkering around with it but couldn't really get it to my liking. Mainly just want a way to keep track of daily lab values for each patient I have on my iPhone.

Thanks!

I tried out Bento last night, and the iPhone version seems to be lacking what seems to me to be the most important feature - the ability to do searches.

The search feature does not seem to allow me to search just against just a field. For example - people who live in "CA" shouldn't also show me people named "Baca".

Maybe I am missing something obvious. But a database without searching is kind of pointless...

- Chris

Change is good. Usually.