Review by Michael McKee

Bento is not a pro’s database. If you expect the features of Filemaker or Access you’ll be disappointed. But the last time I looked those programs were more than 4 times as expensive and targeted to an entirely different audience. For what it is and what it costs, Bento is pretty (expletive deleted) good. It’s easy to use, easy to learn and well integrated with Address Book and iCal. With that integration it can quickly be massaged into a capable project management database. For those missing the database in Appleworks it is a definite upgrade.

I wanted a bird watching database that would include photos, recordings of songs, places, sighting dates, descriptions, related species and miscellaneous notes. I’m collecting information, not doing calculations this is a nice fit.

Within 45 minutes of installing the program I had my forms ready and was entering data. Being a designer, I went back and prettied up my forms a bit but that wasn’t necessary. I went back and looked at the tutorials later and they seem pretty good. My first inclination was to build the db in MySQL and put a web front end to it but that would be a lot of work. Bento was just what the doctor ordered. Bento is a little funky in the way it does joins but is a kind of relational database. But then I didn’t want to mess with SQL anyway.

I would like to see some Applescript capabilities and a bit more flexibility in printing reports. I haven’t tried to integrate Bento with Automator. With no Applescript dictionary, I’m not hopeful. But scripting a database is not something I would expect the target market for this app to even think of, or if they did, they would run screaming in terror.

Looking at the negative reviews all I can think of is that people were looking for a bargain Filemaker and not considering Bento on its own merits and in light of its intended market.