Most small businesses and creative enterprises know they need a database. But the learning curve may seem steep for anything but Excel, but Filemaker has a solution that leaves that spreadsheet in the dust: Bento. The latest release of this compact and muscular tool links iPhoto libraries to the $49 database.
Bento arrived in the Filemaker stable when the company realized that its flagship product might not fit for small customers. We’ve used Filemaker for our publishing company since 1995, but Filemaker 10 is more database than some people need. Bento takes care of that complexity without sacrificing essentials and the Mac’s trademark ease of use.
Bento 3 connects database entries with iPhoto’s libraries. If your business is image-based in any way — photography, video, even inventory items you’ve tracked with visuals — this will be a fresh asset in tracking business.
What’s new is summarized on the Bento Web site, but a Grid View is one of the more useful image-based improvements. You will need to be up to date on your OS X version — it doesn’t work with anything older than Leopard 10.5.7 or Snow Leopard 10.6.1.Current users of Bento can upgrade for $29, and if you need multiple copies of the product you can order what Filemaker calls a Family Pack: Up to five users working at the same address for $99. Remarkably, Bento 3 allows up to five users on the same network to share the same database at once — a capability that was once reserved for the full Filemaker software.
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