Forget how it ooks: iOS is not a toy. Despite appearances, your iPhone and iPad are powerful computers, capable of much of the heavy-lifting previously reserved for desktop PCs, And, wflh a burgeoning amount of useful productivity apps, iOS is increasingly being used as a workhorse, touch presents some useful ways to put iOS lo work,
Bento is one of those apps some of us struggle to get. Non-users can't seem to grasp what it's for, and those users accustomed to its bigger brother, FileMaker Pro, see it as underpowered. But Bento has, in our view, two different purposes: One is to take some of the data stored on your Mac and extend it. For example, with Bento it's easy to use the Address Book as the base data source and then add to it This could be used as the foundation for a basic Customer Relationship Management system. You can access your Address Book data in Bento and add fields like the type of contact (phone, email, meeting) and when it took place. This held can even use your iCal data and link it all together with meeting notes. You could do this all manually, but Bento forms the glue between all this different data.
Conveniently, the datayou add to your contacts doesn't actually change anything in the Address Book, so syncing to MobiieMe or other online services isn't affected. However, when the Address Book is accessed via Bento, the extra data is available.
The second use of Bento is to create your own applications. We use Bento every day to manage our workflow. When we get an idea for a story, we pitch it to the editor, if it's accepted it moves from 'Pitched' to 'Commissioned' through to 'In Progress', 'Completed' and eventually to 'Paid'. We store deadlines, the number of words needed, a list of associated emails - Bento can link to your email if you use Mail - and other important bits of data.
The first couple of versions of Bento were locked to the Mac, but in 2010 FileMaker released iOS versions of Bento that made it easy to sync data from your desktop or notebook to an iPhone and iPad. Bento is designed for a single user, so syncing between a desktop and portable Mac isn't supported (although there are some workarounds for this assuming you have purchased licenses for each computer). However, it's easy to sync Bento between your Mac and an iOS device.
FileMaker has designed separate versions of Bento for the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. This is because the screen size dictates a different user interface on each platform. However, those differences don't mean that you lose out on functionality. It's possible to use Bento to close to its full capacity without having to ever purchase or run the OS X version.
The OS X version of Bento is licensed to sync with one iPhone and one iPad. The iPad and iPhone versions of Bento are purchased separately.
WORKING WITH BENTO
Working with Bento on any platform is easy but it's worth understanding some of the terminology Bento uses.
Firstly, what many of us call a database Bento calls a Library. An extracted subset of the data from a Library is called a Collection (in database-speak this would be a query or a report). Collections can either be static or 'smart'. A normal collection is a once-off extraction from your Library. A Smart Collection dynamically updates as your data changes - like a smart folder in the OS X Finder.
An easy way to see the difference is to work with your Address Book. When we add a new record to the Address Book, we type some descriptive information in the notes field. For example, for any family members, we enter the word'family'. When you launch Bento, it automatically creates a Library from the Address Book. If you've created any groups, they appear as Collections.
We created a Smart Collection (File > New Smart Collection) in Bento that picked up entries with the word 'family' in the Notes. From there, we could then take advantage of a new feature added to Bento 4 - mailing labels. From the Print menu we chose Labels and were then able to create customised mailing labels using any of the Avery standard sizes. If we added the words 'Christmas Card' to the notes we could easily produce a Christmas card list each year and produce mailing labels.
When we open the same collection on an iPad or iPhone, we can access our Smart Collections. If we look at the list of Libraries we can see a small icon with a number in it. Tap the icon and you can choose the Smart Collection you wish to use. If you need to create a new Collection, you can do that from within the iOS versions but there's no way to create a Smart Collection from the iOS version.
One of the neat features of Bento's design is that you can create different layouts on each device. For example, we created a custom form for our Collection that is suited to the large display on our 27in iMac. For the iPad, we use the Clipboard template. On the iPhone, the layout is managed by Bento as there's little scope for any visual extras on the smaller screen. That means our data is easily accessed and used as we switch between devices.
Fields can accommodate different data types such as dates, text, numbers or lists. Bento makes data entry easy by automatically displaying an appropriate input tool. For dates, the date picker appears. For numbers, a numeric keypad pops up and text gets a full QWERTY keyboard. When you create a Bento Collection you don't need to do anything special - the software handles all that for you.
If you're not going to use the OS X version of Bento, you can create Collections on your iOS device. You can either start with a blank slate or use one of the many different templates as a starting point. If you have a specific
purpose in mind and lack the time or inclination to build a Collection from scratch, there's the Bento Template Exchange. However, to access templates from there you'll need the Mac version of Bento.
WHO WILL USE BENTO?
Honestly, when we first received a reviewer's copy of Bento, we were a little skeptical of why we'd use it. But it's turned out to be an indispensable tool. Most of our business workflow lives in a Bento application that we can use in the office or on the road. The ability to easily sync business data between devices is invaluable.
Bento's greatest value, in our view, is taking annoying organisational tasks and making them easier. Things that you manage in spreadsheets can be easily migrated into Bento using its import tool (that's how we started). Then, instead of dealing with an every increasing spreadsheet that gets more cumbersome to filter and sort, you can look at your information easily.
With the iOS versions, it's easy to create Collections for specific jobs and to edit data on the go.
Honestly, when we first received a reviewer's copy of Bento, we were a little skeptical of why we'd use it. But it's turned out to be an indispensable tool
Bento for OS X version 4.0.2
Bento for iPad Version 1.1.1
Bento for iPhone version 1.1.1
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