May

5

Bento For iPhone Released Today!

Filed Under Bento News 

It finally happened: for $4.99, you can download Bento for iPhone and iPod touch from the Apple App Store. See the Filemaker Press Release for more details, including a video.

Quick important note: Bento for iPhone is a standalone application and it does NOT have all the features of the desktop version. But if you do have both applications, they work together beautifully.

Also today, Bento 2.0v4 was released, a free update of the desktop program. Here’s what’s included:

  • improves performance (speed) for several key tasks, including launching the application, selecting the Address Book library, searching the Address Book library, deleting records or entire libraries.
  • provides compatibility with Bento for iPhone and iPod touch:
  • the ability to synchronize your Bento 2 for Mac data with the newly released Bento for iPhone and iPod touch – and vice versa
  • provides compatibility with iWork Numbers 09
  • resolves an issue related to displaying addresses in Japanese

And here’s a BentoUsers.com exclusive piece of news: Marketing revealed to me that Filemaker has decided to establish a Bento template exchange in the near future. An exact timeline is not available at this point.
In the meantime, keep enjoying the templates on BentoUsers.com. I will add new ones before the end of the week.

Comments

9 Responses to “Bento For iPhone Released Today!”

  1. Jens Rasmussen on May 5th, 2009 2:21 pm

    And now it’s official…;-)
    Got it today. Have just synced. Syncing works fine, and independently of other syncs that might be set up; somewhat like iTalk, at least as easy, I would say.

    One problem: It does not sort Danish letters correctly:
    Æg, øl, ål
    get treated like numbers in the Address Book and custom libs,
    so milk from Øllingegaard goes to the top of the list, when it should appear after Zendium toothpaste.

    The “Search all libraries” feature has got to be addictive! Finally some of the good stuff from my Palm with FileMaker Mobile – now for the new decade! :-)

    I don’t understand the logic in including Address Book and excluding iCal, but time will possibly tell.

  2. Florian on May 6th, 2009 5:34 am

    Jens,

    are you saying Bento for iPhone doesn’t display or synch with iCal?

    BTW, if you look on the right side of the screen on the 2.0v4 upgrade site, it lists the supported languages – and Danish is not on the list… otherwise you could probably get a version that would sort correctly.

  3. Kyle on May 7th, 2009 7:52 am

    I like this. I bought it straight away, and found it worked as advertised.

    The only improvement I hope for so far is better searching. It seems the search function only searches through the primary and secondary field. I don’t get any results if I search for something not found in those two fields.

    It’s easy enough to select any field I want to be the primary and secondary, but the benefit of a database is being able to search multiple or selected fields. Restricting search to just two is a bit, well, *restrictive*!

  4. Barry Kerrigan on May 7th, 2009 7:59 am

    Caution: Doesn’t upgrading to 2.0.4 mean that we will lose all of the font and template customization that we might have done to 2.0.3?

  5. Florian on May 7th, 2009 11:43 am

    Barry,

    no, it doesn’t. That would be horrible…
    I upgraded myself without a hitch – all templates and fonts are intact. Some of what you are referring to happened when upgrading from Bento 1 to Bento 2, because the developers had changed the spacing between fields. The fonts still stayed the same. This time there was no major change. That’s why it’s free…

  6. Florian on May 7th, 2009 12:56 pm

    Kyle,

    I haven’t played with it yet. But see the comment of Jens, above. Have you tried the “search all libraries?” Maybe that one would be less restrictive.

  7. Florian on May 7th, 2009 4:24 pm

    Jens,

    the reason for the exclusion of iCal must be that it’s not available to the iPhone developers at this time. Bad for me too. I have many nice iCal collections, of sports meets for example.

  8. Kyle on May 9th, 2009 5:58 am

    Hi Florian.

    Yup: tried “search all libraries” as well, with no joy. My library is my own collection of legal cases, with name, citation, court etc, a topic and sub-topic field, and an ‘additional search terms’ field.

    I’ll need to rejig those last three, so I can set the topic and sub-topic as the primary and secondary fields on Bento for iPhone. Fortunately, it’s not too large a library yet, and I can feasibly do it.

    I’m very pleased with Bento aside from this, but I think for any serious database use with the iPhone, this might be a problem for many users.

  9. Florian on May 9th, 2009 6:58 am

    Hi Kyle,

    see my newest article with the official list of differences between the two apps. Unfortunately it confirms the search problem.

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