Feb

18

My Uses For Bento 2

Filed Under Bento Tips, Editorial 

Hi, Hello, Guten Tag,

this is your new management talking. I’m excited to publish my first complete post! With my headline I wanted to suggest that I will only support Bento 2.03, the newest version as of this writing. Besides that I’m running it myself, I feel that serious users will upgrade no matter what. The simple reason for upgrading is that you don’t only get new features but especially bug fixes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand or respect why people DON’T upgrade. I was mad too that I missed out on the Black Friday special…

Now to give you some ideas, here is an excerpt of my Bento libraries and collections:

(Collections under iCal Events:)

  • CC meets (of my daughter)
  • Track meets
  • Nordic Ski races

(New Libraries:)

  • German Legal (dictionaries for my Interpreter job, many special collections)
  • The Musical Director (compilations of 20 years of conducting; fancy forms)
  • Sheet Music (…that I own)
  • Home Improvements
  • Home Inventory
  • Theme font list (a list with samples of all fonts used in Bento themes)

I’m also using Address Book.

I would love to get your comments like your own special uses of Bento 2.

Florian

Comments

4 Responses to “My Uses For Bento 2”

  1. Jens Rasmussen on February 19th, 2009 2:43 pm

    (Collections under iCal Events:)
    Great, you just inspired me right there. Thanks!
    I have added some smart collections to keep track of my teaching in an easy way.

  2. Florian on February 19th, 2009 8:47 pm

    Welcome, Denmark!
    You’re welcome, Jens. Yes, if you use iCal Events for all your appointments, the possibility for regular and smart collections is endless. And it’s so much easier to find certain events. More examples I’m using myself:
    Any purchases I make
    All data of my business trips (I’m a freelance German interpreter)
    Any collections that divide special events by date ranges (or simply by calendar years)
    And don’t forget: you can go many levels deep when you define a smart collection.

    I’m also using iCal Tasks collections:
    Whenever I have to take a migraine pill to get statistics for the doctor…
    Any tasks that have to be done at home to keep things running smoothly: changing any kind of filter, batteries in smoke detectors, light bulbs burning out, etc.
    In the latter case I use a regular collection and enter data directly in that collection.

    Finally, it’s so nice that each collection can have a totally different template (look).

  3. Sandra on February 20th, 2009 12:04 am

    I’m bummed I didn’t know about Black Friday! However, I tried Bento 2 and liked some of the features that made my life easier, so I got it off of Amazon.com for $44.99. I’d still like to see more in an upgrade.

    Thanks for taking over the site.

    At the moment, I use Bento mostly to organize the contact information for my students.

    I’m getting ready to transfer the dvd, video information I have in excel files into Bento.

  4. Florian on February 20th, 2009 1:00 am

    Hi Sandra,
    thanks for your heads-up!
    Everyone will have a different opinion about what constitutes an upgrade and what doesn’t. If you don’t get the features that YOU expect then you’d like to see more…
    but I tend to agree that at least there should have been more new convenience features in the upgrade, that would give the advanced user more flexibility, like an option to turn off the “grid” on a form to place fields freely, and also font style options within text fields. And many more.
    I do think that stuff like that would satisfy users much more.
    Second, I would hope to see more free maintenance releases which would make the program more stable, secure, and might add some small enhancements. That, too, would make users happier, Filemaker would slowly gain their trust and people would look more favorably at the next bigger upgrade.
    Unfortunately, Apple is known for charging the full upgrade price for their lower-priced software. But I would still like to see loyalty pricing.

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