Review by John Faughnan

Bento version 2 has gotten some good reviews.

I can’t explain that.

In my testing it’s a toy application.

I have a large iCal database with about 6,000 events living on a G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.5. This is a relatively large event collection (though it would not stress Outlook at all) and my hardware is dated – so I expected a few performance issues.

I did not expect dreadful performance. Minutes to open the Bento (SQLite really) database. A minute to add a single event record. Inability to add a record when viewing a query (filtered list). No drop down for calendar names …

If you’ve used any database you’ll be surprised to learn you can’t emulate a join; you can’t find common names in two lists for example.

This is a toy application that will only work with small data sets on a modern machine.

It’s awful. Filemaker should be ashamed.