Working and developing with Filemaker on a daily basis, I’m used to creating powerful databases with ease. When I first herd about Filemaker’s a new product “Bento”, I was pretty excited to see what it was all about.

Discovering a database that can easily tie into applications built into OSX sounded perfect to me. The interface also gave me a nice OSX feel right out of the box, unlike Filemaker (unless you heavily modify the layouts).

The First Time Using Bento

A few months ago, I signed up for the beta demo of Bento and tried it out. Giving the demo a try for 3 hours straight, I became highly disappointed with the all the limitations. There were so many limitations to the database, I became frustrated and removed it from my hard drive, hoping the final release would bring more features to the table.

The Final Release

After downloading the final release and playing with it for another 4 hours, I discovered pretty much nothings changed since the beta, except it’s now stable. There are a lot of disappointing / lack of features in Bento, which I amazes me that this came from apple.

Some of the Main Disappointments

1. There is No Spotlight Integration..
2. There is No EZ Way to Share a Database Between Multiple Computers or Users. Yes this is a personal database, but I have 3 different computer I use everyday.
3. Very Limited Customizable Themes, your pretty much stuck using their premade themes (21 to be exact, which a lot look the same).
4. Can’t Really Print Out Customized Reports. Theres only Table View or Form View. In any database, the output features should be just as good as the input features.
5. Can’t Sort By Priority Field (High, Medium, Low) It sorted alphabetical, so “low” is always in the middle. This is most likely a bug, but it still sucks.
6. No Password Protection.. If your using a database that contains private information, your SOL.

As much as I tried to enjoy this database, the lack of features drove me insane… I’m sure some of these features will be worked out in up coming versions, but right now Bento pretty much sucks.

After buying two 2.8 ghz 24 inch iMac’s for the holidays, I decided to upgrade both iMac’s to 4 gigs of ram each. While searching for the which type of ram they take on apple.com, I saw apple selling their overpriced ram…

I couldn’t believe the price! $1,000 per computer. I did some comparing on Pricegrabber.com and bought 4 Gigs of ram for both computers for $320 vs $2000.

Need instructions on how to upgrade your ram?

Check out these excellent videos from Other World Computing and great prices also.

iMac (Mid 2007) Video
Mac Pro (intel) Video
MacBook 13.3″ (intel) Video
Mac mini (intel) Video
MacBook Pro 15″ (intel) Video
G4 PowerBook ‘Aluminum’ 15″ Video
G4 PowerBook ‘Titanium’ (all models) Video
Mac mini (G4) Video
G5 Video
G4 ‘Mirrored Drive Door’/'FireWire 800′ Video
G4 ‘QuickSilver’ & ‘QuickSilver 2002′ Video
G4 Cube Video
G4 AGP ‘Sawtooth’ & ‘Gigabit Ethernet’ Video
G3 Blue & White/G4 PCI Graphics Video

On January 4th 2007 Apple filed a lawsuit against Think Secret concerning a product called “Asteroid”.

It seems the lawsuit has ended and unfortunately Nick Ciarelli the publisher of “Think Secret” will no longer be publishing for the site anymore.

On December 20th 2007, Nick Ciarelli wrote “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

I know many of us will miss thinksecret.com as much as I did. As much as I love apple, it’s a sad thing to do.