Mar

30

The Bento Database Manager

Filed Under Bento Basics | 62 Comments

Update – 14 September 2011
The original Bento Database Manager detailed below should not be used with anything other than Bento 1. I was hoping to release a new application to work with later versions of Bento but unfortunately the project has now been killed off and I’d recommend that people use the database picker built in to Bento itself. See this article for further information.

The Bento Database Manager is a simple utility which allows you to manage multiple Bento database files more easily than you can by hand. It has been written using AppleScript and the source script is included in the download file along with an application file and a PDF user guide. The application file can be placed anywhere but your Applications folder is as good a place as any.

bento-database-manager-2.png

Please read the user guide before using the Bento Database Manager and please take special note of the various disclaimers!

Download the Bento Database Manager

Mar

26

Calculating Ages

Filed Under Bento Tips | 18 Comments

It is fairly simple to add a field to a Library which will show you someone’s age. You need to add a Calculation field to your Library and set the formula to be:

Addendum
If you are using Bento 3 or 4 (and presumably other future versions) you can use an undocumented math function to simplify the calculation. If you edit the formula to read ‘Floor( ([Today] – [Birthday]) / (60 * 60 * 24 * 365.25) )’ then Bento will round the age down. Essentially you can remove the ‘- 0.5′ element. Note that there must not be a space between the word Floor and the opening bracket.

Calculating Ages

Read more

Mar

23

Photograph Sales Tutorial

Filed Under Tutorials | 3 Comments

Tutorial Cover Page

Beatrice Hamblett is a photographer who both sells her pictures and donates them to organisations such as museums. She needed to store detail about her photographs and also keep records about where they had been donated to or who they had been sold to. When she decides to make a photograph publicly available it is generally via a limited run of either ten or twenty five prints.

This tutorial explains the steps taken to develop a solution for Beatrice and it includes topics such as field definition, form design, and calculations.

The tutorial’s Disk Image contains a PDF document and a bentodb file which contains the completed solution. The steps necessary to use the bentodb file are included on the last page of the document.

Download the Photograph Sales Tutorial.

Mar

19

Over 250,000 Downloads of Bento

Filed Under Bento News | Leave a Comment

FileMaker, Inc. issued a press release yesterday which contained the news that over 250,000 users have downloaded Bento so far. The majority of the downloads have been done by North Americans and the company is just now beginning to distribute Bento around the world. In addition to English, Bento is now available in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.

Mar

19

General News

Filed Under Site Notes | 3 Comments

Apologies for the recent silence which has been due to two doing two fairly time-consuming tasks.

  1. I have been developing a small application which allows you to manage and work with several bentodb files. This means that it is now fairly easy to swap between data files so you can effectively split your Libraries into different files.
  2. I have been writing our first tutorial guide for Bento. This is the first in what I hope will be an on-going series of guides which take real-world examples of how Bento is used and explains the theory behind the design. The tutorials are provided as both a PDF document and an accompanying example file. If you have any ideas or requests for future tutorials then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

Hopefully both of these will become available on the site within the next day or two and once they have been completed the addition of new tips and articles should be back up to a fairly steady pace.

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