Oct

5

Bento Power Users: Beware!

Filed Under Bento Bugs, Bento Tips, Editorial | 12 Comments

My first important Bento 3 project was a disaster: Bento crashed about 50 times in the process! Before I go on I want to stress that this long article is mainly for the benefit of Bento power users like me. What is a “power user” ? Here’s my personal definition (a summary):

I read all versions of the Bento user’s guide from cover to cover, I was an award winning beta tester for Bento 3, I am using Bento for countless ongoing and archival projects, both personal and business. I’ve learned to use most features to the extreme and to my advantage to create highly useful, informative, and visually pleasing Bento Libraries.
By now, I’m also experienced in finding workarounds for Bento’s shortcomings. But most importantly, I’m expecting Bento to cooperate. In other words, I expect a stable environment AND consistency: the advertised features have to work as described and should yield predictable results. And they really don’t in many cases. But that will be the subject of another comprehensive (power user’s) post.

Back to my problem over the weekend. I visited my daughter at college and gave her a copy of Bento 3. Then I wanted to give her the elaborate Library Collections I had compiled from her athletic prowess in High School. Databases of races and events from three sports: Cross Country Running, Nordic Skiing, and Track. Since Bento supposedly can export & import templates and data files, it should be a straight forward process, especially for a power user…
But first there is that huge (template) export/import bug that nobody but me seems to care about (see my previous report). The bug only involves the iCal and Address Book Libraries and their Collections. Unfortunately, my project ONLY consisted of iCal Events Collections. But I know exactly how to edit the exported Collection templates to squash the bug and make them usable on another computer. It just takes a lot of time. I start with a virgin database file, import the template to delete erroneously duplicated forms, collections and fields (I even forgot that last step this time). And since you can’t import any data into Smart Collections I also had to “convert” them to regular Collections before exporting the now “clean” template again. And this was the point where all the crashes started:

Bento 3 has a potentially great feature: you can now copy Forms within the same Library and its Collections. Now I am given a TOOL to convert a Smart Collection into a regular one, so I can import my data. All I have to do is copy all the forms from the Smart Collection into a regular Collection and then delete the Smart Collection before exporting the template.
After copying several forms successfully, Bento crashed all of a sudden when I ctrl-clicked a form to copy it! And after the crash the database file became so corrupt that Bento would not restart! So I had to ditch the database file and had to start over with a fresh one. And that happened over and over again, now triggered by various actions. I saved the template a few times anticipating the crashes but I could never finish it before Bento crashed again.
Finally, I figured out that I could keep editing the template even after Bento crashed – because the application didn’t actually quit, even though the pop-up window said so…

But the final template file is not working perfectly – it displays some strange behavior, sometimes random, sometimes consistently – both are very annoying. At least just using the template and editing its data doesn’t trigger crashes… and until the Bento team fixes all the bugs, I can say I found another workaround I can live with, even though it doesn’t make me happy.

Bottom line: the new feature of copying forms is not stable! It was a last minute addition and should have been tested much more thoroughly. Make sure you work with a copy of your database file before you use it! It was clearly the main trigger of the crashes, together with the incomplete and misleading (template-) import/export function (I really call it a bug too). This function has to be totally re-designed, but at this point I’ve given up hope…

My clear verdict: even the newest version of Bento does not even come close to satisfy the high standards of a power user like me. And that has nothing to do with a lack of features. IMHO, it just has sloppy implementations of even the most basic features which I wlll explain in detail in my next post.

And I would rather wait longer for an upgraded version if it would mean that all features were tested more thoroughly before its release.