Fields in Bento are sometimes more analogous to relationships, value lists, and even tables. And Bento has something called Fields, but they stretch our common notions in many ways. Gone are tables, relationships, keys, and so forth. The entire system seems to try as hard as possible to dispense with complex database concepts and terminology. There’s more to Bento than this, of course. * Field ~= Field, Sort of Relationship, Sort of Table * Library ~= Database and a little bit Table Instead, a Bento checkbox has just one value, and a pop-up menu has it’s own embedded list of choices.įor the curious, here’s my first stab at a Bento-to-FileMaker dictionary: When you create a Bento field, you decide if it is a checkbox, pop-up menu, date with calendar, etc. In Bento, what you might call field controls (the little buddies you put on a layout in FileMaker) and real fields (the things in your tables) are even more intertwined than in FileMaker. Specifically, your Address Book, Calendar, and To Do lists are all libraries in Bento, ready to incorporate with your own creations.Ĥ. Bento treats some important system-wide data as first-class Libraries. (Under the hood, libraries seem to employ a few tables, if you assume the whole thing is RDBMS-like, but a Library has one central entity, and is entirely themed around listing, finding, and browsing its instances.)ģ. Each Library is a lot like a FileMaker Pro database with a single primary table. Instead of Databases or Tables, you have Libraries. All your data is stored somewhere in the ether of your operating system, much like your iPhoto and iTunes libraries.Ģ. The real *point* of Bento, if you will, seems to be a re-imagining of desktop database software. When you use bento, you quickly realize subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) animations are a big part of the experience.īut those are all just technicalities. This is almost certainly because it takes advantage of one of Leopard’s flagship new developer features called (). It won’t run on older versions of Mac OS X, and it won’t run on *any* version of Windows. Most striking, Bento requires Mac OS X 10.5 (better known as Leopard). You can use Bento to build simple databases, and track even large amounts of data efficiently. It has nothing to do with FileMaker at all. Here’s our take.įirst, the basics: Bento is *not* FileMaker. For a FileMaker announcement, Bento is getting () () () () in the Mac media. Nobody I know had any idea this was in the works, and I’m pretty sure it is the first product from FMI that is not directly FileMaker Pro related since Claris Organizer was released back in 1827 or thereabouts. Many people were surprised by Tuesday’s announcement from FileMaker Inc.: A new “desktop database” application called ().
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |