I became a FileMaker customer in 1988, using it to aptly keep track of the things that need organizing in our lives. When the Apple-owned FileMaker company introduced Bento, it seemed a strange, additional product whose parallel reason for existence was not immediately clear. Study and experience have made the distinctions obvious.
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The FileMaker company has announced that they will stop offering Bento as of
September 30, 2013.
Support will continue until July 30, 2014. (Seduced and abandoned.)
Now, wouldn't it be interesting if this was a preliminary action before adding a light database app to iWork, a la the old AppleWorks? :-) A good alternative to Bento might be iDatabase, which has Mac and iOS versions and can sync from Mac to iOS via Bonjour. |
Named after the compartmentalized Japanese meal box, Bento is a database suited to personal usage, organizing the compartments of our lives. Bento inherently ties in with your Address Book (contacts), iCal (calendar/schedule), and your iPhoto library. Whereas FileMaker Pro is for both Mac and Windows, Bento is not versioned for Windows. Bento started out on the Mac; then came a reduced version for the iPhone (and iPod touch); then came a somewhat boosted version for the iPad.
The single word summary for the reason would be: cost. FileMaker Pro costs $299, and $179 to upgrade. Bento costs $49 on the Mac, with a proportionally smaller upgrade cost. (The upgrade is offered for a reasonable period of time following a new release, whereafter one must pay the purchase price.) Bento is a lot more affordable.
The second compelling reason to choose Bento is that it is also available on Apple's handheld devices: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Not only that but, get this, the price there is just $5! And you can sync a copy of your Mac Bento database table from the Mac to the handheld device. The version on the handheld device is a true, manipulable database environment, just not as fully featured as the Mac version: the differences are summarized in FileMaker's Answer ID 7620 document What are the differences between Bento for Mac, Bento for iPad, and Bento for iPhone/iPod touch. Why would you want a database on your mobile device? A good example is when you are out video disc shopping and see a good price on a certain title — but you're not sure whether you already own that title. If you've seen people toting a large, printed list of videos they already own, you'll immediately appreciate the expediency of having the list on your Apple mobile device.
FileMaker Pro is an "industrial" database package, providing a wealth of capabilities which are well in excess of the needs that most people have for a database they will use for their personal needs.
While FileMaker is an Apple company, and follows Apple interface guidelines, they are not obligated to adhere to the Apple infrastructure; and with that freedom, they take independent approaches to things. (The separation of the two companies is pronounced in Apple keynote presentation, where FileMaker company products are rarely mentioned.)
Bento's orientation is more modern than that of FileMaker, as the company had the opportunity of a fresh start with the invention of the product. One of the first things you'll notice is that whereas FileMaker was file oriented, Bento is not: you would have a FileMaker database in your file system which you would double-click to launch; but Bento takes the more modern approach of being app-centric, where you simply launch Bento, and your data is there with it. In that way, Bento is in tune with the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad in the view that slogging through a file system is just so old-school and unnecessary.
Bento does not burden the person with database/table terminologies. Instead, Mac Bento stores related information in what it calls Libraries.
In syncing a dependent device to your Mac, "sync" is synonymous with the usage of iTunes as the syncing vehicle. Bento does not adhere to that convention, which is likely partly due to Apple not wanting a subsidiary database product having a dependency which could hinder the evolution of the company's primary infrastructure. Instead, Bento itself performs the synching, over a wireless connection, directly between the Bento instances running in the two devices.
On July 20, 2010, the FileMaker company released FileMaker Go, being a mobile version of the FileMaker product, for the iPhone and iPad. Database systems must be developed on the desktop; thereafter they can be remotely accessed via FileMaker Go conducting a session with the FileMaker server, or by transferring a copy of the database to the mobile device for on-the-go reference. Hopefully, the development effort on FMGo will not detract from Bento development: it might even help further both products.
So, is FMGo worth getting into? If you're committed to FileMaker Pro, Go is probably worth it to you, to have a portable version of the database you're familiar wity. Again, you have to be willing to pay the price: the iPad version costs almost as much as the full Bento for the Mac.
Here's how to sync with an iPad:
Turn on the Mac and iPad, and have both active on the same wireless network.
Launch Bento on both.
On the iPad, go into Tools (the gear symbol, upper right) and choose
Sync With a New Computer.
This will result in a 4-digit passcode being displayed on the iPad.
In the Mac Bento, go into File > Set Up Sync with Device.
The iPad will show up in the Mac Bento boxed list of
Choose your mobile device.
Enter the 4-digit passcode on the Mac.
Bingo: Immediate pairing and syncing.
In Mac Bento's left pane, the DEVICES entry will show both your iPhone/touch and
the iPad.
On the iPad, its Tools area will show when the last sync occurred along with a
Sync Now button.
Restriction: Syncing is restricted to a common set of Libraries for the set of mobile devices. This is to say that you can't have your videos list on just your iPhone and household inventory on just your iPad.
So, what's it like to upgrade from version 1 to 4 on the iPad? The new version downloads and installs separately: it does not replace the earlier version. When you first launch the new version, it detects that the prior version was in use and presents a dialog box to allow the new version to adopt the database that was in use with the prior version. To accomplish that, the database must be exported using the earlier Bento, which is dynamically invoked in the background, whereupon the database is now available in the new version. Many customers use the Mac Bento as their primary database repository, being the definitive data source, and sync to their mobile devices from that, such that the database migration within the iPad is somewhat superfluous, but still a good thing to do.