Filemaker TP934LL/A Bento - Macintosh
by Filemaker
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Software Reviews of Filemaker TP934LL/A Bento - Macintosh
Customer Review: Fantastic little database
Summary: 5 Stars
I love it. I was looking for a database for my real estate business, personal stuff and list management. Bento is perfect. I was easily able to create a real estate database including multiple forms for various stages of a transaction.
I love the 3.0 update, although it was a bit pricey in my opinion. The app for iPhone is fantastic and the 2nd most important reason for getting this program. I love that I can store all my info in one app and have it at my fingertips.
Very easy to use, which is the point with Bento. It is not meant to be Filemaker but an easy to use database.
Other points, it imports and exports into excel or numbers very easily.
I agree with another poster that the app needs to be able to be viewed in landscape.
I would also like to see the fields listed in the app in the order they are in the table view.
Well worth it!
Customer Review: Broken and no plans to fix it
Summary: 1 Stars
THere are some serious flaws with this product. When I contacted Filemaker who developed Bento I was told that only bugs that cause data loss will be fixed. I have to live with the other issues or buy v2 which also has bugs that will not be fixed per this policy. Don't believe me? Check out their own web forums. Customer Review: read user comments before you buy
Summary: 1 Stars
There are a ton of reviews for this product on the web, try to filter our the marketing plants and the irate users. I purchased Bento from amazon and here are my thoughts on both usability and the now infamous Filemaker policy regarding NO upgrades.
The best thing about Bento is that their intention was to make a VERY simple database "oriented" product that looks great. There really is a niche for this product and assuming you can find ways to make it your own then it has value. The greatest strength is its greatest weakness and that is why most people who critique this product find it too crippled for their use. Through tweaking the guts of the program I was able to make it useful for me but it IS a very elementary piece of software.
So should you buy it? I have reviewed the upgrade to Bento 2 and still find little different from Bento 1 to change my review in the previous paragraph. This certainly is not a full upgrade from 1 to 2 and still can disappoint many a buyer. I have hopes that this will become a mature product but I fear that it will not. To me the issue lies in the attitude of Filemaker as they are not looking at this software as a long term project.
Based on the research I have done they have either made a major marketing blunder in alienating their core users or they are simply taking a short sighted view on who will buy their product (ie one-time buyers who care little about the long term use of the product.) I myself will wait for Bento 4 (which in Filemaker timelines may be released within the year :)
Customer Review: Unacceptably slow, surprisingly awkward, feeble capabilities
Summary: 1 Stars
Bento version 2 has gotten some good reviews.
I can't explain that.
In my testing it's a toy application.
I have a large iCal database with about 6,000 events living on a G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.5. This is a relatively large event collection (though it would not stress Outlook at all) and my hardware is dated -- so I expected a few performance issues.
I did not expect dreadful performance. Minutes to open the Bento (SQLite really) database. A minute to add a single event record. Inability to add a record when viewing a query (filtered list). No drop down for calendar names ...
If you've used any database you'll be surprised to learn you can't emulate a join; you can't find common names in two lists for example.
This is a toy application that will only work with small data sets on a modern machine.
It's awful. Filemaker should be ashamed.
Customer Review: Cute, but eh - and no upgrade to 2? Shameful!
Summary: 2 Stars
Bento is a cute way to organize your contacts, etc, but it's certainly not powerful. It's certainly not worth $50, though I guess it's better than paying $300 for FileMaker.
I bought Bento about six weeks before they upgraded it to Bento 2, and they're not upgrading me at all. How rude!