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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.

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

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:

Read more

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.

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.

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.

We are going to try out having a public iChat address so that people can ask a quick question or just say hi. However this really is a trial thing and we’re not sure how well it will work, how much we’ll be on-line and available and how busy it will be. If you do see us on-line and try to initiate a chat but are ignored then please don’t be offended, it probably means that we’re chatting to someone else or grabbing a coffee.

Anyway, the iChat username is ‘bentousers’ but please note that the associated .mac email address will not be checked or used so please don’t send any mail there.

Index pages for each of the categories have been created and these should make it easier to browse the articles available on the site.

The main index page is available from the top menu and this page provides links to each of the category index pages.

Dennis Golombek is an avid photographer and camera club member and he decided to use the digital media template to keep track of the images he enters into competition. He added new fields for competition dates, scores, judges’ name and judges’ comments regarding the images. He plans to keep track of all the digital images he enters for the monthly competitions that his camera club runs.

Click for a Larger View (600 x 360)
Click for the Largest View (900 x 540)

Although Dennis’ idea may not seem to be very complex it is an excellent example of the sort of thing that Bento can be used for. By his own admission, Dennis is of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy and likes to have his programs do just what he wants them to do and nothing else.

Before getting into teaching art Dennis was a newspaper police reporter and then a forensic photographer (crime scenes, fatal accidents, autopsies, fingerprints … CSI kind of stuff before DNA was being sought). He taught art as well as computers mostly at the middle school level before retiring after 25 years in 2005. Obviously his interest in computers and photography continues and he competes regularly in monthly photo competitions at the Twin Cities Camera Club.

Dennis’ site can be found at http://web.mac.com/mrgee59/Site/Main.html.

Bento appears to use a single data file to store your Libraries and this file is called bento.bentodb and is stored in your user’s Library/Application Support/Bento folder. If you look at the details of this file via, for example, Get Info’ then you may notice that the Modified date is not the same as the date when you last used Bento, This is because the bento.bentodb file is actually a Bundle which is essentially a folder which containing other files and folders but appears to be a single file. Within this bundle there is a file called ‘database’ and this is the file that is updated every time you use Bento.

You may wonder how Time Machine handles the bento.bentodb file considering that it doesn’t appear change but Time Machine is clever enough to work out that the contents of the bundle have changed and will therefore back it up as it would any other changed file.

Although Bento does not automatically sort the items in a Choice Field and offers no automatic way to re-sort the list it is possible to simply drag and drop items in the list to a new position.

Thanks to ‘doublespiral’ for posting this tip in the Bento forums.

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