BentoUsers » Site Notes

Wanted: Enthusiastic Contributors

Florian — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:19:37 +0000

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.

BentoUsers is Under New Management

Simon — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:57:57 +0000

The last few weeks and months have been very hectic for me and if I am honest I simply don’t have the time to maintain BentoUsers properly. Preferring not to close the site I was fortunate enough that several very kind people responded to my request to find someone to hand the site on to and one of those people was Florian Keller. Florian is very active in the official Bento forums under the moniker ‘saintflo’ and I am sure that he will do a fantastic job.

I have greatly enjoyed running the site for the last year and I have met some fantastic people as a result of it. It’s been a wonderful experience and I’m only sorry that my other projects have taken over my life leading to BentoUsers being slightly neglected.

Simon

Theme and Template Downloads (was ‘A Third-Party Bento Theme’)

Simon — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:02:12 +0000

PLEASE NOTE: The details about the theme which was related to this post has now been moved to this page.

Earlier today Patrick La Roque sent me the details of a theme he had created for Bento 2. This galvanised me into action and I decided to give up on finding a useful automated way to handle template (and now theme) submissions and it seems easier to simply manage them manually. Therefore the Downloads page has been updated with details about how you can submit your templates and themes and the information I need from you.

Hopefully the library of available downloads will now grow and become a useful resource and I will endeavour to find a more beautiful way to present them.

I decided to keep this post simply because of Patrick’s comment which remains below.

Not Abandoned, Just Busy

Simon — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:00:32 +0000

After a long period of no updates I just wanted to assure you that BentoUsers has not been abandoned and the lack of activity recently has simply been due to an excessive amount of work. In addition to teaching myself Cocoa so that we can start producing applications for OS X at work I also attended WWDC in San Francisco in the first half of June which was a fantastic week where I not only learnt a lot about Mac software development but I also managed to meet some of the FileMaker Inc. team behind Bento.

Normal service will be resumed shortly with lots of new tips and articles planned.

General News

Simon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:22:55 +0000

Apologies for the recent silence which has been due to two doing two fairly time-consuming tasks.

I have been developing a small application which allows you to manage and work with several bentodb files. This means that it is now fairly easy to swap between data files so you can effectively split your Libraries into different files.
I have been writing our first tutorial guide for Bento. This is the first in what I hope will be an on-going series of guides which take real-world examples of how Bento is used and explains the theory behind the design. The tutorials are provided as both a PDF document and an accompanying example file. If you have any ideas or requests for future tutorials then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

Hopefully both of these will become available on the site within the next day or two and once they have been completed the addition of new tips and articles should be back up to a fairly steady pace.

Contact Us Via iChat

Simon — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:53:56 +0000

We are going to try out having a public iChat address so that people can ask a quick question or just say hi. However this really is a trial thing and we’re not sure how well it will work, how much we’ll be on-line and available and how busy it will be. If you do see us on-line and try to initiate a chat but are ignored then please don’t be offended, it probably means that we’re chatting to someone else or grabbing a coffee.

Anyway, the iChat username is ‘bentousers’ but please note that the associated .mac email address will not be checked or used so please don’t send any mail there.

Article Indexes Added

Simon — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:02:29 +0000

Index pages for each of the categories have been created and these should make it easier to browse the articles available on the site.

The main index page is available from the top menu and this page provides links to each of the category index pages.