14 November 2007
Today FileMaker, Inc. began a public preview of Bento, a new personal database designed specifically for Mac OS X v.10.5 Leopard. Bento is designed to help Mac users organise their lives by giving them one place to put their important information, from contacts and calendars to projects and events. Bento can organise activities related to work, home, school and community.
Bento automatically displays contacts and calendars kept within Address Book and iCal. There is no need to re-enter existing names, phone numbers, email addresses and upcoming events into Bento so users can start organising and extending to their information right away.
Bento users can organise contacts, calendars, photos and files so they can easily do the following and more:
- Manage a vast amount of contact details
- Coordinate events, parties and fundraisers
- Track projects, assignments and deadlines
- Connect related information together
- Prioritise tasks
- Catalog inventory, donations and items for sale
- Record hours worked and payments due
- Assign ratings to service providers and sellers
- Create libraries for music, movies and other media
- Store files and photos in relation to projects and events
Bento builds on Leopard?s gorgeous new look and consistent design to bring simplicity and style to personal databases.
Key features
- Built-in links to Address Book and iCal
Be productive instantly by integrating and adding to your contact and calendar information. Add photos to your contacts, add invitees to an iCal event, and more. And because Bento links with Address Book and iCal, you can see data on your iPhone or share it over the web with .Mac.
- Stylish templates and themes
More than 20 ready-to-use templates sport elegant themes to reflect each user?s unique style, personality or activity. Forms and fields are designed with coordinated colours, layouts, fonts and text styles for immediate use.
- Works with iPhone and .Mac
Bento links to live Address Book and iCal data. No synchronisation is necessary to be in sync with Bento, since Apple?s core technology takes the information to iPhone and .Mac for sharing over the web.
- iTunes-like search
Searching, organising and sorting records is simple. Create collections to store work, personal or volunteer tasks in the same way you would create smart playlists in iTunes or albums in iPhoto.
- Drag, drop and import with ease
Rearranging, regrouping and viewing lists or forms are drag-and-drop easy, as is importing or exporting data from Microsoft Excel, Numbers or any other program that creates CSV files.
- See things your way
One-click customisation options for themes, columns displayed, label positions, text sizes, shading, and alignment; the Table View allows for easy sorting and quick stats in Summary Row; Add more pages to view different slices of information.
- Get the Leopard experience
Users will love many of the exciting new Leopard capabilities in Bento, including: Media Manager, which allows users to store and change images in Bento fields; live connection to iCal, which exchanges data between calendars and tasks; Advanced Find, which re-uses the ?Advanced Find? module from Leopard?s Finder for pinpointing specific information within the database; and Time Machine, the new Leopard feature that allows for easy database back-ups.
Availability
Bento is designed to run exclusively on Mac OS X v.10.5 Leopard. A free public preview is available at www.filemaker.com.au – follow the Bento link at the top of the page.
FileMaker intends to ship Bento in January 2008. The Bento public preview is time-limited beta software meant for evaluation purposes only. Please read the software license accompanying the preview software for full terms and conditions.
Source: Filemaker
