Bento is one of those programs that I have seen on the wall at the Apple Store that I was curious about but didn't want to buy. At $49 (the list price quoted on their web site at the time of this posting) I couldn't justify a purchase for something that I thought I would never use. After taking a One to One session at the Apple store it made me think twice about purchasing it. By the middle of the hour long session I was sold but by the end I decided to put my purchase off. My recommendation is a mixed one for this program. Like most of Apple's products, I think this is a great program but I don't like the trapped feeling I get .
Bento is a database program from the company FileMaker, Inc. which makes a Bento and FileMaker (a professional database). FileMaker, Inc. is a subsidiary of Apple. Apple provides training in their One to One sessions for Apple products geared toward the home user. Unfortunately that means that they don't have training for their FileMaker professional level database product. Bento is a database program geared toward the home user and the One to One session I took sold me on the value of the product. Will I buy Bento in the future form myself? Will I be taking more One to One sessions for Bento in the future? I think I will be taking more One to One sessions for sure but I will be putting off a purchase in the short term.
All of Apple's programs included in OS X and in the iWork and iLife suites have a high degree of integration. They all "talk" to each other. If I download a video from my still camera into iPhoto I can open it up in iMovie for editing. If I want to add music to a slide show in iPhoto I can search iTunes. Apple programs used as a "suite" provide a much better experience than you will find in Windows for the average user. Bento actually provides a higher level of integration for these programs.
My understanding of Bento is as a personal database for a local computer that provides an even better Apple/Mac experience. Every Apple program provides a "list" view of objects/files that it works with. What if you could have a list of objects/files from several programs in one place? That is what Bento does. Imagine having a home work project. Your Mac would contain a due date in you iCal. This might be a group project and you have contact information in your Mac Address Book. You might have notes and several drafts in Pages, a spreadsheet in Numbers, and a presentation in Keynote. Parts of your Keynote presentation might require audio/music files from iTunes, photos from iPhoto, and movies clips from iMovie. That is a lot of stuff that needs to be searched for in each individual program for this one project. Each of these programs acts as a "container" for the associated files and provides an index you can search to find these specific files. Bento provides a "place" for you to work with all these different files without having to hunt around all the programs in your computer. Bento can organize files into what it calls a "project." Instead of making a copy of each item and putting them into a folder Bento leaves the files where they are and provides a "listing" and a "viewing" functionality within a project. The user opens a project that they name and there in this "folder" are listed all the files/objects that the user has chosen to "put" there. Bento also provides the functionality of letting you view these items but not edit them. Bento doesn't move or copy the items into a folder. It just records the locations for you so that you can access them quicker and easier. When you back up Bento you don't back up any of the data in a project but only the indexes. Bento reminds me of playlists in iTunes. In iTunes a playlist just point back to where a song is located in iTunes. You can create a lists for different collections of songs without having to recopy each song into a separate folder just to make it part of a collection.
I was immediately sold on Bento at this point. Not having to open several programs that require computer system resources and having to hunt in different indexes sounded great. My second reaction was, why didn't they include this in Mac OS X? Why do I have to pay another "fifty bucks" for this functionality? I have already payed double or triple what a PC would have cost and this type of integration and ease of use is why I payed that premium price. Another down side of Bento is that it is really just a creator of indexes/lists. If you want to back up your data on a project you will need to back up the data in each of these individual programs. I have already wrestled with iTunes lately and trying to back up all the data on Apple applications just didn't sound so great. I like to have data and indexes on two computers at one time. What if I do all my work on a laptop and then I loose it or it gets dropped? My data is gone. My tutor agreed that Bento is a great solution for one computer but not multiple ones. For a lot of users this won't be an issue for them. They only intend to own one computer at a time and will do all their work on one computer. If their data or indexes get lost....they just aren't planning for it. Are there ways around this back up issue or being able to "sync" two computers? I will definitely need to take some more One to One sessions to see if there are some work arounds to this. Maybe the issue is really doing back ups the Apple way. What I want from Bento might be better provided by a back up solution like using Time Machine over a network. I do think that Bento would be a great utility for any Mac. I just don't like the way that I feel trapped inside these Apple programs where data and indexes are trapped in programs on a single machine. I also don't like the lack of compatibility with other programs. In Pages I ran into the problem of not being able to save Pages documents as .docx documents for Microsoft Word but only as .doc documents. I was excited about using iCal and Address Book with Bento but was disappointed about not being able to use Microsoft Outlook in the same way with Bento. Bento seems like a program that would appeal to a single user for home or a very small business. I could see Bento being used not only on multiple Macs but also in a mixed environment with PCs. I kind of have the feeling that if Bento was owned by Google this product would have these features of compatibility and backup. Apple makes great products but they refuse to take that next step and open up their world beyond the local computer. I feel like my MacBook is an island, Google is the ocean and Microsoft is the cheesy cruise ship. I hope that more One to One sessions will educate me to the point where I buy into the Apple way of doing things. I hope that my MacBook is not just a novelty. Let's hope that further education and some of the promises of iCloud will change this. Compatibility and backup may be solved with iCloud but until then I will need One to One to get me past these hurdles. This is another Apple purchase that I am putting off.
