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One of the hot new products out for Mac (or at least heavily advertised products) is Bento by FileMaker. I’ve been receiving emails about, I’m getting slammed with information about it at work, and I just keep hearing “What is Bento?” So I finally downloaded myself a trial copy and began playing around with it. This is not a review, these are just some quick thoughts and answer the biggest question: What is it? If you’re looking for a review, a quick google search will reveal many.

What is it?

FileMaker says its a personal database. Too bad that for a user-friendly application, this doesn’t say much. But Bento actually is that powerful… it can store almost ANYTHING in an organized way (a database!). How would I use it? Well, I would use it for programming projects. For each programming project there is some information I’d like to store: A goal, a start time, some references to documents for research, etc. Also, I’d like to store notes on progress of the project as I work on it, so I know what was last done and what still needs to be done. Also, I would like another database to store information about my classes, including teachers, office hours, course URL, homework assignments, etc. There is no other program out there I know of which has the flexibility to create such a database so easily. If you want a custom database, Bento is for you.

What needs improvement?

Here is the reason I don’t use Bento: I can’t take it with me. It’s the same reason I didn’t use iCal before I had an iPhone! I thought iCal was great, I could store my appointments, classes, work schedule, homework, etc. Awesome! But all this information became useless as soon as I left my computer. What if I needed to modify it? view it? add to it? I couldn’t without my computer. Useless, for myself.

This is the same with Bento. I LOVE the organizational techniques of Bento, and I would love to use it to further enhance my homework planning, project management, etc. but a lot of times I need to access this information away from my computer. So I will say this now: As soon as Bento has a companion application for the iPhone (hopefully when the SDK comes out this month), I will use Bento, and I will love it.

Until then, Bento fills a very specific niche.