Jan

24

Bento As A Motivational tool

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[Submitted by Daikoma, German guest-contributor]

What about your New Year’s resolutions: stop smoking, going to the gym, taking a yoga course to get more relaxed? Are they still on track?

Finding motivation to keep healthy habits is often hard. In my opinion, Bento can help you in an easy way: create a simple Check Box  field in you iCal Events Library! And check it in Bento when you’re done with your task. It helps me personally a lot.

My tips for a sports calendar

  • Create a calendar in iCal called “sports.” Than create a simple Smart Collection for the “sports” calendar in Bento and add a check box called “task completed.” Move it into the first column in Table View.
  • Create dates when you want to go to the gym. If you’d like to add notes use the notes field or an Encrypted field, then the notes are not displayed in iCal (Bento 3).
  • Let iCal remind you one day in advance so you can get your gym bag ready the night before.
  • When you come home from the gym, check the check box in Bento. I recommend using Split View, then you can see your progress over the last couple of weeks. Feel satisfied and proud!
  • This also fits, for example, when you maybe paid for 20 massages or something else: you know your dates, when you were there, and when the package will end.
  • And if you are a young man living on your own, it maybe helps with the housekeeping ;-)

Why encrypted notes in a calendar?

My gym, for example, is health-oriented. It’s not so much for body-builders, but to motivate people who sit in the office all day to get some exercise. Or to help people with back pain. So there’s a doctor, a physiotherapist, and special instructors in my gym. That’s why you might want to keep your notes private.
They won’t appear in iCal, so your colleagues at work can’t see them when they look over your shoulder, and you can look at them at home in Bento for Mac or iPhone. This is the advantage of the iCal integration in Bento: you can add a personal touch & convenience to your calendar!

Mar

19

Wanted: Enthusiastic Contributors

Filed Under Bento Basics, Bento Examples, Bento Tips, Editorial, Site Notes, Tutorials | 13 Comments

Hey, at his very moment I’m running BentoUsers all by my own lonely self. I know, I know, it seems I have this huge supporting staff behind the scenes. But that’s just a rumor. All I have is some people I can ask questions if I’m totally desperate. But I’m the only one publishing things and coming up with the ideas. That has to change! After all, the site’s main motto is:
Written By Bento Users For Bento Users. I clearly detect the plural form here and it wouldn’t sound very good to change it to the singular form…

I’m calling out to any other user, starting with my friends Dan and Barb, you know yourselves, how wonderful you are! I do appreciate the templates users have contributed. Keep them coming! But now I’m also looking for (regular?!) contributors. It could be a weekly column, the occasional tip or trick, special usage ideas, workarounds… pretty much anything. Even just someone who scours through the posts and leaves some comments on a regular basis. Point out the errors of my ways, make suggestions!

I hope I gave you some starting thoughts how to help out. Come out of the woodworks, get famous and help change the (Bento) world!

Thanks for listening…

Yours Truly, Lonesome Florian.

Dec

22

Magazine Management

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Sandra Hall is the editor of a magazine and in this article she explains how she uses Bento to keep track of submissions, pictures and ideas for articles as well as keeping track of what needs to be done to get an item ready for the magazine, permissions to be sought, proof-reading tasks and more. Read more

Mar

11

Photography Competition Management

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Dennis Golombek is an avid photographer and camera club member and he decided to use the digital media template to keep track of the images he enters into competition. He added new fields for competition dates, scores, judges’ name and judges’ comments regarding the images. He plans to keep track of all the digital images he enters for the monthly competitions that his camera club runs.


The Main Form

Click for a Larger View (600 x 360)
Click for the Largest View (900 x 540)

Although Dennis’ idea may not seem to be very complex it is an excellent example of the sort of thing that Bento can be used for. By his own admission, Dennis is of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy and likes to have his programs do just what he wants them to do and nothing else.

Before getting into teaching art Dennis was a newspaper police reporter and then a forensic photographer (crime scenes, fatal accidents, autopsies, fingerprints … CSI kind of stuff before DNA was being sought). He taught art as well as computers mostly at the middle school level before retiring after 25 years in 2005. Obviously his interest in computers and photography continues and he competes regularly in monthly photo competitions at the Twin Cities Camera Club.

Dennis’ site can be found at http://web.mac.com/mrgee59/Site/Main.html.

Mar

4

Goat Herd Management

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Wendy Lee and her husband run Tiannan Woods Goats (http://tiannanwoods.com) in Philadelphia, TN. They have a small herd that they are raising to sell as meat. It is important that they keep careful records of breedings and in particular the following types of information:

  • Knowing when the does are ready to kid
  • Knowing when to give vaccinations
  • Keeping performance records of the kids as they grow so that they know if they are feeding them too much or too little
  • Tracking prices
  • Tracking farm expenses

There are herd keeping programs available, but most of them are either for Microsoft Windows, are too expensive or are just not really what they needed. They have tried keeping records in a spreadsheet which works but is not ideal and since Wendy got a new iMac for Christmas which came with Leopard installed and a preview of Bento she decided to give it a spin and soon knew that she had found what she needed.

Read more