itsmyiPad review: Bento for iPad

Bento is Filemaker’s popular consumer database program and one that has recently undergone the inevitable iPad face lift. The program is aimed at casual users who want to structure personal information relating to home, hobbies and home office activity. For more advanced users who want to create sophisticated databases using SQL or web-based functionality, Bento is not really suitable. So how does the app measure up?

Above all else, Bento is designed to be easy to use and whilst it’s certainly accessible, its simplicity can also be a hindrance at times. Users create a database by adding a new library. Libraries contain individual records that can be organised into collections of matching items for ease of use. The process of creating a database is straightforward; simply tap the ‘+’ icon and a menu of built-in templates pop up, including blueprints for tracking calendar events, fitness programs, car maintenance, home inventory, club and society membership and attendance records, plus several aimed at home business owners – contacts, inventory, customers, time sheets. Adding records to the library is then a quick finger tap and you use the iPad keyboard to edit information or select the correct values from drop down fields.

Although you can sync up a Bento database from a Mac with the iPad and take it with you, frustratingly, the template and theme settings from the Mac are not applied to the iPad version. This is a disappointment if you’ve invested time in developing your own custom application. What you are left with post import is one of the three basic themes currently built into the Bento for iPad app. These are a bit clip artsy and would dissuade me from doing too much work on the look and feel of my iPad database, which seems to defeat the purpose of syncing with a desktop or laptop. You don’t seem to have any control over the fonts that are available with each theme and I can imagine your collection of databases becoming a bit boring if you had several libraries for different areas of your life. Hopefully this is something Bento (or 3rd party developers) will address with additional template themes for iPad.

One nice touch of the syncing function, however, is that you can choose to hide certain fields of information if your imported database contains a lot of data and just leave the most important content visible on the iPad. These hidden fields can be restored at any time.
Where Bento is a lot more fun to use is creating a custom form on the iPad using a Blank template. You choose the fields that you want to add – text, currency, checkbox, number, rating, date, URL, Email, Media (image, movie, audio) – and within minutes you can have a ready to use form for capturing data on almost any subject. I think the package does a great job at making this activity quick, easy and fun.

Holding the iPad in portrait mode displays one record per page. Tilting it to landscape, however, reveals the Library window and allows you to scroll through the entire database as when using iPhone Contacts.

One final comment is that performance seems quite sluggish. When adding records or changing views, there is a noticeable delay before the screen reveals. Whilst not a showstopper, it is out of keeping with the fast performance of iPad apps generally.

All in all, whilst a perfectly capable piece of software that lives up to its objective of being easy to use and accessible for casual use, Bento is certainly not for more sophisticated users. Although you can have fun with custom forms, the lack of formatting options, limited retention of imported look and feel and sometimes slow refresh performance suggest this was a product slightly rushed to market. In short, good enough but could be (and hopefully will get) better.

Do you use Bento or another iPad database app? Share your experiences by commenting on this article.