Jan

14

How To – Template Sharing Part One

Filed Under Bento Basics, Bento Tips | Leave a Comment 

Bento Template sharing is a wonderful way of learning and teaching the many possible uses of Bento. But it is not always easy to create a “clean” Template for sharing, especially when Address Book and iCal Libraries are involved. So I’ll share some tips today.
I haven’t played with Templates including Related Data from iPhoto. That will be an interesting addition for a future post.

Recently I received a Template for evaluation that included a Smart Collection from Address Book. The author chose to include Address Book as a Related Library. To do that you just have to click a check box in the “export Template” dialog. The result was that I got all of his 39 Address Book Collections in the bargain! That also means that 39 new groups were created in Mac Address Book!
As described in my article Unexpected Template Behavior Bento can’t make the distinction if you just have a Related Data field of one Address Book Collection in your Template. It includes all Forms and Collections!
Read more

Jan

10

Template Exchange Problems!

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First off I want to apologize for all those recent negative posts. We’ll hopefully tip the scale soon. I’m just trying to make users aware of the problems. It’s not my fault that there are so many of them piling up. I’m just not the person who will ignore bad issues.

More bad news today…

Be careful when downloading templates from the Bento Template Exchange at Filemaker. Apparently, they accept most templates without checking them out first. Many are designed very poorly, some are even corrupt. Also, inexperienced users in the forums complain, because they don’t even know how to use the templates without instructions.

We don’t have that many templates here on our site, but our quality control and service is included:
I will not publish a template without testing it first and improving it, if necessary.
Secondly, every template will be described as to its features and usage and will include original-size screen shots.
Finally, you can always leave comments, especially useful for any open questions.

Tip: remember, a template is only a starting point. Your exact personal needs might be different. So read the user’s guide to help you modifying a template.

Dec

20

Bento 3.0.2: First Crash

Filed Under Bento 3 Crashes | 2 Comments 

Didn’t take long. One of those crazy crashes I actually had before:

I was working in iPhoto, moving some pictures around and all of a sudden the Bento icon in the dock is jumping!

How can Bento crash while it’s running only in the background???

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.

Dec

10

Free Bento 3.02 Update Released

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Filemaker, Inc. finally released a bug fix update of Bento 3, you can download it here if you don’t use the automatic update feature (Bento 3 preferences):

Bento 3.02 info and download page

Only two specific fixes are listed (both had been reported here on BentoUsers.com), for the rest it just says “other user-reported issues.” It would have been very helpful to get a complete list of bug fixes, or if it would have said something like: “Bento 3 is now more stable.” The latter would be the most important fix.

Well, let’s try to be positive: this update is a step in the right direction, since it shows the willingness of the Bento team to keep testing the program and at least address SOME of the inconsistencies. I will report any specific bug fixes I might find by chance…

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