That doesn’t mean the product isn’t worth the $4.99 it costs at the App Store. Bento arrived with a one-page home screen meant to serve as a manual, a handful of database templates (these are called Libraries in Bento) and three skins to style my creations.

But say, for example, you wanted to assign several attributes to an item in an inventory. iPad Bento doesn’t get the idea of multiple tick boxes for one record. It want you to create a field for every attribute like overseas item, tax free, custom sized and the like.

As a database Bento has gotten so minimalistic in its mobile versions that it seems suited only for a very personal information manager. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s good to know going on how much you can fit into this Bento’s box.

Moving among publication spreads is as simple as leafing through a paper edition on Zinio's iPad app.

Creating content is still months away from the iPad’s capabilities, but consuming information is ready today. While publishers like Time-Warner want you to purchase single issues of their magazines for the iPad (at about $5 each), Zinio has a free app and a better idea: delivery of a paid full year’s subscription, ready to display on that gorgeous mobile screen.

Zinio’s app provides able organization of your subscriptions, although arranging the magazines seems to be left to alphabetical order. Multiple issues get archived on the device, but you can delete them to save space and just re-download them if you need to read from the past.

The response you see on the iPad while you initially access a magazine can be ultra-subtle at first glance. The app uses Apple’s spinning clock icon while it downloads enough issue to get your reading started. If you noticed the word “download” used regularly up to now, that’s because there’s no other way to enjoy the brilliant pages off the Zinio newsstand. The equivalent of magazine streaming doesn’t exist anywhere yet. And so your initial steps into iPad reading are limited by the size of your WiFi bandwidth.

The full range of Zinio’s newsstand is not yet ready for iPad consumption, because some pubs use Flash in their presentation. Zinio makes its sales and delivery services available to all publishers, but the pubs themselves are in charge of de-Flashing their content. Or more accurately, adding a non-Flash version to their issues. It also bears a mention here that Zinio is selling product without being forced to pay Apple a share of what it collects for its publishers. Apple has a fine walled garden going on in the App Store, but Zinio’s app gives you a gateway into a larger world of purchasing.

The clearest beauty of using the Zinio app comes in zooming into a graphic. National Geographic put together a lively interactive version of its April edition that covers water — and a map of “the third pole” in Asia that might span only the space of two NatGeo paper pages gets the zoom-in treatment on the iPad, so you can enjoy the information at a larger scale than paper could provide. On the downside, we couldn’t get a video feature of the NatGeo sample to run on our iPad, even though the bandwidth was wide open. The fault here might lie with NatGeo, Apple or even the app. This month, many things on the iPad feel like a 1.0 experience.

You can shop for extra subscriptions or single issues through Zino’s iPad app, once you set up an account and provide a credit card number. Many of the publications will sell you back issues, though this kind of one-off reading can get pricey. Subs run from about $10 (a year of SmartMoney) to $46 (52 issues of BusinessWeek) up to 52 issues of The Economist at $126.99. This kind of single-touch shopping will remind you of browsing in Apple’s App Store or the iTunes store: a place where a purchase can be as spontaneous and quick as a meeting requires you to be prepared for. If you love magazines as I do, this app can make the experience addictive.

Indexing and searching a Zinio iPad version of a publication is still in the future for this app. There are many clickable links strewn on pages of magazines such as MacWorld, Popular Science or Smart Money. Most publications offer a complete table of contents with links you can touch to jump to an article. But knowing where to go to find, say, the latest on Health Savings Accounts for your employees, is a matter for a smarter interface than the ease of the iPad. You can do a simple search online at the Zinio Web site, but alas: Flash is required to view and preview pubs through the Zinio Web interface. Searching via the Zinio Web site delivers shopping links to content that you can’t read on the iPad yet, although this is plainly marked — and you can fire up the MacBook to read nearly every magazine in the joint. Flash is lurking, though, in the Web interface.

The multi-touch interface, however, can go places that no browser will travel right now. Turning the iPad to a portrait aspect will show off a single page to fill the screen. Turning the iPad to landscape mode gives you a spread, to enjoy the complete layout — graphics which magazines still do better than any other medium. You can zoom and pull the pages as needed in either aspect. Touch the screen and the spreads appear below in page order, including the ad spreads.

Yes, the Zinio versions of publications include the advertising, and always have, even before the iPad app was released. Ads still bolster most of the publication world, with rare exceptions such as Consumer Reports. You can flip right past them as if they were on paper, although in the iPad version the ads contain touchable links that carry you to an advertiser’s Web site, if you wanted to do more research on say, Web hosting.

It’s easy enough to capture a file that you could transfer into a presentation: simply use the iPad’s built-in screen grabber, by holding down the home button and clicking the shutter with the on-off button. Once you plug the iPad into your Mac, the pictures pop up in iPhoto, where you can export the snapped pages using that application’s tools.

Even better is an e-mail feature that lets a subscriber share an article with a colleague. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many articles you could forward to your staff. Clicking on the e-mail message of the text pops up the iPad’s keyboard, so you can annotate with your own message or edit the article down to the salient point you’re passing along.

Overall, I was hooked on using Zinio’s app to consume publications. It’s a genuine test of the readability virtues of the iPad, and a way to read in the dark when you wake early in the morning and want to start your day with some news-gathering. You can download the free Zinio app in the App Store and enjoy a few free pubs to decide if this interface is right for you. I’m glad to have access to information that doesn’t involve storing what I’ve read somewhere around the office, or recycling. Zinio is pushing the publication experience into a new place with the iPad: a mobile library that sacrifices none of the attraction of reading while it extends your ability to share information.

Filemaker 11 makes it easier than ever to take business data and create a snapshot of your information to help plan. It's also got dynamic links to auto-update such graphics

The canvas of the Filemaker database is wide and rich for Mac business users, an enduring data capture resource that looks even more vivid in the newest release of this tool. Filemaker 11 rolls out today with a big palette of charting and graphics shortcuts, the kind of built-in prowess that makes a great case for using the $299 solution instead of an Excel spreadsheet.

If it feels crude  to substitute a spreadsheet for a database, Filemaker’s Product Group Manager Rick Kalman says research shows otherwise. About 40 percent of the 15 million copies of Filemaker have been used by small business or small groups within larger companies. Already familar with Microsoft’s iconic spreadsheet, they press Excel into record-keeping of business inventory, sales or contacts. In doing so they limit the power of seeing their business portraits from every aspect.

The primary competition for us is Excel spreadsheets and paper, frankly,” Kalman said, “and that’s a pretty good target.” The features run well beyond the Excel hints and assistants that suggest you might be managing a list. And Filemaker 11 adds a feature that’s fast-becoming a Mac software standard: the Quick Search window in the top right of many programs, such as nearly every browser.

There's nothing like this in Excel, and the new Filemaker includes templates to go to work immediately with a professional-class database

Graphics stood out in the one-hour demo that Kalman led us through about a week ago. The wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple is among the best of Apple’s captive partners at creating tools ready for businesses, and the Filemaker 11 is ready to show off a company’s products, people in client databases or internal staff and contractors, even a new feature that interacts with Twitter to push in-progress photo updates for custom designs like guitars or Web sites or illustrations. But the concept of pictures extends beyond the fresh graphics tools in Filemaker 11. A new Snapshot link “flags a specific set of records at a point in time, preserving the same layout, view and sort order. Any changes made to the file are automatically updated in the database. This Snapshot Link file can be emailed to anyone who has FileMaker Pro 11 for easy collaboration.” That means that changes to you data can automatically be updated in a collegue or client’s office if they have Filemaker Pro 11 at hand.

Filemaker 11 arrives at the latest stop in a 26-year line of development for the software that started in 1984 as Nutshell, created for the PC DOS marketplace. Before long the software was shaped into the Mac’s premier database tool and delivered to both PC and Mac users. Microsoft’s Access is a worthy competitor on the Windows side, but some small businesses don’t consider their information repositories to be the most valuable asset that doesn’t clock in or report on a time sheet. It’s short sighted, and Filemaker 11 goes an impressive step to meet these customers more than halfway.

The software has a starter-marriage cousin, Bento 3, which has gotten rave reviews and even enjoys an iPhone app to bring its data into the mobile world. But while Bento data moves into Filemaker easily, the transfer of Excel spreadsheets to get started in Filemaker 11 is a new feature.

Users who have extensive databases in Filemaker formats would be well-served to read through the product’s documentation to make a clean transfer that will preserve all your layouts and data fields. Import features for Filemaker databases go right up to Filemaker 11, but you’ll want to have an FP7 format of your database (used by Filemaker 7-11) ready for import. Filemaker is reaching back to the Version 8 and 9 customers with upgrade packages.

There are 31 database Starter Solutions in the new Filemaker 11, many designed for the business user

A starter solution for invoices helps you take advantage of the data-ready layouts and databases included with the software. A quick-start screen is also new, one of the many features Filemaker has added to get a business rolling quickly with an ample array of data tracking solutions. Populating these databases with existing data gets to be a matter of looking over their data fields and managing the match-up of your data with these fields. This data-match process still needs some work for the average user. Excel imports can only be done if they’re the latest XSLX format, so if your Excel is 2004 or older, you’ve got file conversion to consider, or an upgrade to a newer version of the spreadsheet.

Of such details are transitions to Filemaker from spreadsheets made. There’s enough goodness in this new version to justify an upgrade from 8, 9 or 10 (the older software must be upgraded by Sept. 23 to qualify for the discounted price.) If you’ve bought Filemaker 10 since Feb. 7, your Filemaker 11 upgrade will be free.

Halfway into a million-file scan, it's another two-plus hours to a clean bill of health

You want your Mac security tools to behave like Columbo, or Inspector Plodder from the play Sleuth. Not the fastest of detectives, but one that will not miss a detail. So it goes with the newest VirusBarrier X6 anti-virus and firewall product from Intego. You can set it and go, but you might as well go far away at first. Its initial inspections will take awhile.

On our 2.83 GHz iMac with 4GB of memory, that was more than four hours to do a full scan of our 150 GB of occupied hard disk. Full scan is a choice that the VirusBarrier setup prods you toward once you complete the easy install. Too bad that it’s so easy to send the tool into such thorough paces. VB X6 skips over the “check my malware file for updates” stop, so you notice that your file is “35 days out of date” amid a lengthy scan. We’d lead a user into NetUpdate, the VB checker for updated files, before starting a scan. This is also an “install and force a restart” program, not among our favorites.

A complete scan can be a once-in-a-great-while event, however. VB X6 has got one-0ff scan options for fresh files, or scan the folder, or whatever you want to drag onto nifty interface. The inspector is thorough enough to try to catch malicious scripts, the latest ploy in penetrating you Mac’s defenses. We were glad to see attention paid to a very long list of intrusion techniques like this. Drive-by attacks come out of scripts. You have to hope the malware file gets freshened up plenty to believe VB gets the job done. There’s good reason to believe it’s about 30 days or so between updates.

That’s because we’ve used the Intego products here since their V4 releases and watched NetUpdate finding fresh files at Intego HQ. VB X6 is one of those anti-virus products that arrives with 12 months of update subscriptions and collects a fresh $29.95 for the year that follows your first. By the time you’ve owned VB X6 for three years, you’ve bought the product twice. Of course, by 2013 there will be an X7, and you’ll have that year’s malware files included, if you buy it. (To recap: about $40 a year in cost of ownership, counting the updates, for Intego’s two-computer license.)

The genuine novelty of VirusBarrier comes from its extended controls over the Mac’s firewall. This was once called NetBarrier, just months ago, but now it’s included in the VB X6 package and called Network Protection. Intego used to charge $49.95 for NetBarrier all by itself. We know, because we bought it in December. By February Network Protection was included. While the upgrade to the X6 remains free until April for users who purchased late last year, if we’d waited two more months it would have been free and included.

We were not amused to learn that our X5 products that we’d bought in December got auto-updated to X6 during the install. If X6 had been a bust, we’d be reloading the older versions from a backup. How much nicer to leave an installed program alone and just load up a newer version.

The challenge in making firewall extenders like VB’s useful: You need to know your usual suspects when it comes to invasions of your Mac’s network. Intego does a much better job of explaining who to question than in previous releases in its online documentation. (Um, there are no docs if you can’t get online, like when you suspect an intrusion and want to pull your Web plug while you try to brace up your doors to the outside world.) The logs fill up with messages if want to watch over Inspector Plodder’s shoulder and suggest a new line of questioning. Deciphering them is beyond the average user’s ken, but we’ve got security whiz Steve Hardwick to do our decoding. You may not be so lucky.

This simple animation of your firewall's settings are the most likely view that business users will take of VB's Network Protection

Of course, these worrisome cases of attack are the best reason to invest in a thorough and plodding tool for protection. A MacScan study of our full system was complete in less than half the time, so we’re puzzled about whether VB X6 is more thorough or just eager to look at every single file. It was a puzzle how to tell VB not to examine those packed up download files the Mac expands to install software, or skip the acres of system preferences and files that only Apple installs on your system. You can shorten the time VB spends with all of these, but not eliminate them.

That’s symptomatic of the program’s downside — the need to tinker with its settings to tune up security. You can accept the defaults to get going, and tell VB to do a complete scan regular-like via a calendar. But you’d want to do this overnights. A good alternative is to rely on the “Real-Time Scan” feature, since it chews on about 10 percent of your Mac’s power all the time anyway. Anti-virus tools become a bog sometimes, the tar pit that your Mac tries to climb above while it stays safe — something like body armor you can’t sprint in while you wear it around.

The Web has become a combat zone, a place where a business can see hours killed off after a virus infection or a network home invasion. Nothing’s perfect, but it looks like if you want a beefy utility belt of security tools, and have the patience, budget and know-how to use them, VirusBarrier X6 will track down files with a criminal intent, and bar the door to unwelcome users.

The Mac enjoys an easier time in security because Apple’s product is a less juicy target. Malware and viruses are designed to make money for criminals, and the number of PCs out there running bareback is 10 times the number of Macs. Security by obscurity only works until it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of time, sad to say, before the criminals fan out and try to rob your system of power or privacy or both.

Anti-virus software (AV) is not just the paranoid geek’s tool anymore. The last virus we detected came off a Web page, and we last had data corrupted in 1997. But things have changed since Apple moved to Unix underneath it’s OS. Oh, and there’s that thing called the Internet, plus the Flash videos you may use to gather research (like from the Wall Street Journal’s site, now that they’re owned by Fox.) Flash, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF files, are a big target for malware today.

You have more than one choice for a commercial AV tool for your systems (that wasn’t the case in ’97). What you buy probably should provide both firewall and virus protection. Two leading companies offer very different value propositions in their AV software. MacScan commits to a fixed price, while another supplier uses a subscription fee+purchase price model.

Today we look at MacScan, software built by a company that started tracking viruses in 2002 on the Mac. For five years MacScan didn’t even sell software; it simply created the definition files and patrolled the Web for criminal weapons. Since ’07 they’ve sold MacScan, which despite claims from its competitor Intego, still looks like a worthy value for AV.

Intego, whose products we’ve run at Bites HQ for more than three years, now sells a $49.95 X6 edition of VirusBarrier that protects two Macs. The MacScan 2.7 software protects three systems for the same price. (There’s also a 1-Mac license for MacScan for $29.95; Intego sells only its 2-Mac license.) Figuring the relative value requires you to consider the protection scope of such products. MacScan’s product manager told us at Macworld that the company ships along regular updates of the virus profiles, at no extra charge.

MacScan makes a significant point of examining Web cookies, a source of malware targets, in its regular process. A half-full iMac in our offices took more than an hour to probe with MacScan, but the AV software found nine tracking cookies in the first minute. And no viruses or other spyware. We got an option to disable these ad cookies after MacScan caught them.

A tracking cookie is not something you allow easily into your Mac. While you might not want to erase all of them, these are used by advertisers on Web sites to track your Internet use: where you browse, how you jump from links, even the information you enter into forms online. A fine article on the World Privacy Forum’s Web site explains that “allowing the tracking types of cookies to follow you around as you surf the Web is a lot like building a see-through house to live in, click by click.”

MacScan doesn’t reach any deeper into the malware world, though. It’s good at finding troublesome files on the system, but it won’t do a thing to block access to your computer. Apple’s firewall is the default for the MacScan user. While that’s better security than none, it might not be enough to keep prying spooks from hijacking your bandwidth.

Doing one thing well, and affordably, is noble and true to the Macintosh Way. We like to see more of what back doors might be open on our Macs, however. The extra features of firewall improvement are included with the new VirusBarrierX6. But they’re not easy to use, or so valuable that Intego could keep selling this super firewall that it once called NetBarrier as a standalone product. That’s for Monday, though.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes.

I never want to learn that my original data file has now become a “file that needs a newer version of Quicken” than I had before my conversion. Alas, my 2005 data was tagged as a Quicken for Mac 2007 file. It’s simple enough, I’d think, to simply save my old data in a renamed file.

An interview with the Quicken for Mac product manager Eddy Wu, during a live demo, told a story of a product line in transition. Quicken for Mac 2007 is not being put to pasture, even as Essentials emerges with some very good ideas from Mint.com. Intuit is putting some fresh wood behind the arrow of Mint, a solution some users saw as salvation from an Intuit that had strayed far from acceptable value in Mac users views.

There are people running businesses on Macs who would cringe at the thought of using QuickBooks, even though it’s got invoicing, AP and AR ledgers, all the standard and essential tools for real business financials. (Okay, the payroll solution is miles behind the Windows QuickBooks software, but that’s not as damning for a small enough business to have no payroll, just 1099 contractors.)

Wu said that there will be other versions of Essentials to come, improving on things like investment reporting. The company is listening, having acknowledged the pain of its Mac customers and hoping some Mint ideas might help. Unfortunately the pain isn’t throbbing from the need for smoother interfaces. “I had such high hopes last year,” said a user commenting on Amazon, “when you were promising new good Mac versions, but alas, both Quicken and QuickBooks are missing essential features, which render them unusable.”

Not as unusable as a 2005 file that won’t open anymore, but you get the idea of the rejuvenation task that remains in front of Intuit. At a $69.95 by-over (can’t call it an upgrade), Essentials is still missing enough improvement to spark our new investment in simple business accounting.