Oct

15

Bento Bug: Movie Aspect Ratio

Filed Under Bento Bugs | Leave a Comment

(Any Bento version)

When you drag a movie into a Media field, Bento fits it to all four borders, totally ignoring the movie’s aspect ratio.

This is extremely annoying to me, because I like to make my Media fields as big as I can and my layout somewhat dictates the shape of it. With still images it works great – Bento always keeps the correct aspect ratio and you can zoom the image in and out and move it around within the Media frame.

For movies there are no editing options at all and the aspect ratio is never perfect.

If anyone has a workaround for this bug or has figured out something about editing movies in a Media field that I haven’t, please come forward!

Oct

15

Bento 3 Crash Report: 10-12-09

Filed Under Bento 3 Crashes | Leave a Comment

I would call this newest crash I experienced one of the random variety.

I was simply trying to re-size a jpg picture in a media field when Bento 3 crashed. The database file didn’t seem to be affected – it worked fine after re-start.

I will still report every single crash – because these frequent crashes did not occur in my copy of Bento 2.

Oct

12

Bento Bug: Back-Ups

Filed Under Bento Bugs | 7 Comments

This goes along with the database bug described earlier, but is more important and should really be fixed.

If you make big changes to your database, like deleting 500 records, you might want to create an immediate back-up to secure the changes. But before you do, you have to quit and re-start Bento. Only then Bento has really updated your database file and reduced its size. If you back-up without re-starting, the size of the database file doesn’t change!

Again, this should be fixed, because Bento should be able to create true back-ups WITHOUT having to be restarted! Anything else doesn’t make any sense.

Oct

9

How To Create Database File Sub-Sets

Filed Under Bento Tips | 3 Comments

Thanks to a very valuable comment from Vince, one of BentoUsers’ reluctant followers, I would like to give you the how-to of archiving sub-sets of your Bento database.
My personal example is the collection of race reports from my daughter’s High School sports career.

Here’s the step by step:

  1. Back up your current (complete) database file
  2. Create your sub-set of Libraries/Collections by deleting unwanted data
  3. Quit Bento and re-start which now automatically creates the finished sub-set
  4. Now, back up this new database file, naming it anything you want which creates the archive
  5. In Bento, revert to the back-up of your main database file
  6. Repeat those steps to create more sub-sets

Possibly you might also want to reduce the size of your main database file by deleting the data you saved in your sub-sets.

Note: in my case, my data sub-set consists of iCal Collections. Since Bento has a two-year limit for displaying iCal events, I also saved the Library Records separately as a .csv file. I hope that will work to trick Bento’s iCal limitation. The future will tell. Any comments appreciated!

Oct

9

Bento Bug: Database File

Filed Under Bento Bugs | 4 Comments

Newest bug discovered: when you delete a Library, the size of the database file doesn’t change! Apparently all Bento deletes is the reference to the Library, but not the records or the media!

Since Bento 3 is so unstable, I decided to create sub-sets of my database for archiving purposes. For example, my daughter’s High School sports career is over, so I don’t need to do much more editing on her race reports… but one of my objectives was to reduce the size of that sub-database which Bento didn’t do!

Update: (see comments)

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