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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under Apple, Rotten Apple, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.