Mar

13

Contact Us Via iChat

Filed Under Site Notes | 3 Comments

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.

Mar

11

Article Indexes Added

Filed Under Site Notes | Leave a Comment

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.

Mar

11

Photography Competition Management

Filed Under Bento Examples | Leave a Comment

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.


The Main Form

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.

Mar

9

The Bento Data File Date and Time

Filed Under Bento Basics | 6 Comments

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.

Mar

6

Ordering The Items In A Choice Field

Filed Under Bento Tips | 3 Comments

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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