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One of the areas which seems to cause the most confusion for Bento users is that of Related Records Lists. I am therefore delighted to say that I have written a guide to them which will hopefully explain what they can do, when they should be used, and how they are used.

The guide was meant to be fairly comprehensive but also fairly concise but the number of screenshots involved in making it a good visual guide meant that it quickly evolved into a fairly lengthy document so it will initially be released as a PDF and I will try to break it up into a series of actual articles over the next few days.

Comments and suggestions are, as ever, most welcome.

Download the Related Records Lists Guide.

I am delighted to announce that Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline has very kindly decided to make part one of his excellent two-part Bento screencast available for free and is offering a 20% discount off the membership fee of ScreenCastsOnline if you use the promotional code BENTO.

Part one of the screencast covers the following topics:

• Introduction to Bento
• The Bento Interface
• Core Concepts - Libraries and Collections
• Address Book Integration
• Records & Table View
• Form Views
• Creating a Library
• Adding Fields
• Form Customisation
• Themes
• Advanced Find
• Smart Collections

The topics covered in part two include:

• iCal Event and Task Integration
• How you might use iCal integration
• Additional Bento Fields
• Printing Tables and Forms
• Creating Mailing Labels
• How to import Data into Bento
• Backing up Your Data

ScreenCastsOnline is a weekly video podcast with a new Mac related tutorial published every week via iTunes. A full six month membership costs only $39 with the special discount coupon code allowing you to receive the next 26 brand new weekly shows. In addition, membership gives you immediate access to over 140+ HD tutorials featuring many different Mac related software tutorials including the second part of the Bento tutorial. For more information on becoming a ScreenCastsOnline Extra! member visit www.screencastsonline.com/extra and don’t forget to use the code BENTO.

The first Bento tutorial is available as a QuickTime MOV file which you can download or watch in your web browser below. Click on the small monitor icon to view the tutorial full screen.

The Bento Database Manager is a simple utility which allows you to manage multiple Bento database files more easily than you can by hand. It has been written using AppleScript and the source script is included in the download file along with an application file and a PDF user guide. The application file can be placed anywhere but your Applications folder is as good a place as any.

Please read the user guide before using the Bento Database Manager and please take special note of the various disclaimers!

Download the Bento Database Manager

It is fairly simple to add a field to a Library which will show you someone’s age. You need to add a Calculation field to your Library and set the formula to be:

Read more

Beatrice Hamblett is a photographer who both sells her pictures and donates them to organisations such as museums. She needed to store detail about her photographs and also keep records about where they had been donated to or who they had been sold to. When she decides to make a photograph publicly available it is generally via a limited run of either ten or twenty five prints.

This tutorial explains the steps taken to develop a solution for Beatrice and it includes topics such as field definition, form design, and calculations.

The tutorial’s Disk Image contains a PDF document and a bentodb file which contains the completed solution. The steps necessary to use the bentodb file are included on the last page of the document.

Download the Photograph Sales Tutorial.

FileMaker, Inc. issued a press release yesterday which contained the news that over 250,000 users have downloaded Bento so far. The majority of the downloads have been done by North Americans and the company is just now beginning to distribute Bento around the world. In addition to English, Bento is now available in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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