Oct

25

Lion, iCloud, and Bento…

Filed Under Bento Basics, Bento Bugs, Bento Issues, Bento News, Bento Tips, Editorial | 6 Comments

Urgent recommendations to all Bento users who are not in the habit of doing so:
Check the Bento Forums regularly (link on the sidebar) for any known issues, look at recent user posts, and report all technical issues there as well.
These forums are moderated by Filemaker employees who have extensive testing facilites and personnel and are not afraid to use them. We don’t have any resources like that at BentoUsers.

Let me repeat the most recent issue:
Before you migrate from Mobile Me to iCloud or otherwise turn on on iCloud,
do this:
Make sure you have Bento 4.06
Launch it.
Quit Bento.

After that, you should be ready to surf the new Clouds.

Since Mobile Me will be available until June 30, 2012, I personally am not in a hurry to get OSX Lion and iCloud. But since there are very few issues which have been reported in the Bento forums, I have to assume that Bento is generally ready for the transition. That doesn’t mean that the problems reported here on BentoUsers are not real. But they are not the norm, but rather horrible bad luck.
Still, let’s all keep our eyes and ears open…

May

21

Bento 4.0.3 Update Is Unstable

Filed Under Bento Bugs, Bento Issues, Bento News | Leave a Comment

In the 4.0.3 update, the Bento team tried to fix several user-reported bugs and made Bento unstable again in the process!

With Bento 4.0.2, I had absolutely no crashes, and I worked with it extensively almost daily. But 4.0.3 quit unexpectedly several times. And the strange thing is that it quits over night, while I’m not working on it at all. That same problem existed with an earlier version of Bento, but had been fixed. Now it’s back!
There are no indications that the datafile gets corrupted, thank God. Bento always works fine after I reopen it. And I used two independent datafiles: both trigger overnight crashes, but both work fine afterwards. And Bento 4.0.3 hasn’t crashed on me while I’m working on a database. Only while I’m actually sleeping…

Sorry Bento 4.0.3, but you’re not a sleeping beauty!

I can only hope that the next update comes soon and that it will fix this problem!!

Additional observation: at least Bento has learned to bow out gracefully. When the buggy 4.0.1 version crashed it didn’t even quit. Now the program quits and the little pop-up even has a “reopen” button. Nice. Thanks, Filemaker, Inc., that you gave Bento 4.0.3 a nice funeral. It still counts as an improvement.

Mar

17

Bento 4 Crashes Reach BentoUsers!

Filed Under Bento Bugs, Bento Issues, Bento News | 12 Comments

For two days I was the lucky one – my initial upgrading to Bento 4 went without a glitch. But my luck ran out today. I tried to restore one of my Bento 3 database files (with different libraries in it; I’m using different sets) and Bento 4 crashed before finishing the upgrading. I get this ghastly well-known pop-up window Bento must quit, but like with Bento 3 it actually never quits, you have to do a Force Quit from the Finder. So add me to the list.
And please post a comment if you had a crash yourself.

Patrick, one of our BentoUsers contributor had told me yesterday about the world-wide Bento 4 crashes which were piling up in the forums, so it was only a matter of time until it reached me as well. Now it did.

Two things would be real nice: to fix the actual crash routine which never worked correctly; at least bow out gracefully, Bento 4! Second, a faster fix than with Bento 3. Good luck, Filemaker, Inc.

Dec

18

Strange Bug. Anyone?

Filed Under Bento Bugs | Leave a Comment

I was hoping that the Bento 3.02 update would fix this. It didn’t. The strange part is that this bug is not in MY Bento, but in my daughter’s.

It’s just a little thing, but I do want to put it out there, if just for its strangeness…

On my daughter’s new Macbook Pro, Bento displays a white canvas for html files in a File List Field (Grid View). Other files display a nice thumbnail, like PDF files or Rich Text files. On my own (two years old-) Macbook Pro, the html files DO have a thumbnail! Why would it happen on one computer and not on another? Our computers are very similar, both running Snow Leopard.

If anyone experiences the same little oddity, please leave a comment.

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!

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