Bento

I've made no bones about the fact that FileMaker Pro frustrates me. It's not that I think it is a bad product. I think it is an amazing product but the problem is that I went to FileMaker Pro from Bento. Bento's ease of use and understated power makes a database that fits my needs almost perfectly. It's not without issue but these issues can be largely worked around so I'm not overly bothered by the limitations.

FileMaker Pro is very very powerful but it's interface is more reminiscent of a Windows app than a Mac one which makes it more complicated than it really needs to be. But right from the word go when I got Bento 2 I immediately thought about how cool it would be to have an iPhone version. Well, a few months on and FileMaker has answered my prayers by bringing Bento to the iPhone. iPhone Bento is not just a reader for Bento databases. This is a fact that makes it different to FileMaker for iPhone which I've never used but apparently is more of a web app for FileMaker Pro Server which is another kettle of fish altogether.

iPhone Bento however can be used standalone allowing you to create databases from scratch directly on the iPhone or allowing you to synch using desktop Bento.

Let's start with creating databases in iPhone Bento. FileMaker has included some handy templates to get you started, 25 in all. These range from Inventories, time billing, vehicle maintenance, etc. From these you can add your own fields or you can create a blank database and build it up that way. Fields are your standard types like text, numbers, date and time, etc. There are a couple of fields missing that I need... calculation and related databases. This leads me to synching with desktop Bento.

While calculation and related databases aren't able to be created or edited you can use them if your desktop Bento database uses them. It will only add these as read-only including the data in them. This isn't so much of an issue with calculation fields because they only calculate other fields however relational fields should be editable so that you can add or select entries according to what role your data is playing. To overcome this of course you only need to edit the data in desktop Bento then synch with iPhone Bento and the data is there at your fingertips. Synching is done via WiFi and is pretty quick depending on the size of your database. The larger the database the longer it takes which leads me nicely to performance.

One complaint about desktop Bento is that large databases can cause the app to take a long time to load. While this is the case working with the database is relatively quick. iPhone Bento is very much the same. I have a large 20,000+ record database and iPhone Bento can take a while to load but once loaded it runs fine, no lag or anything unless you're doing searches in the large databases which can be painfully slow as typing each letter will cause it to check each letter being typed until it gets a match. The interface sees a lot of swapping screens. This is largely due to the way the fileds are designed. For instance, a text box is not just a single line entity. In Bento text boxes are generically LongText fields meaning that you're not limited to character sizes. In iPhone Bento this will take you into a screen with a large text box for editing in order to allow you to enter text. You then need to go back to edit the next field. To start with this seems like a long time to edit data but it does make a lot of sense once you get used to it and editing doesn't take too much time.

All in all this is a very powerful database and is by far and away the best database I've used on ANY mobile platform. It works beautifully given the mobile constrains and runs super smoothly once loaded. If FileMaker adds support for creating and editing relational, iCal, and calculation fields as well as being able to edit these then Bento would score 100% with me. I've used it for about a week now solidly and it has been the best purchase to date on my iPhone... next to Flight Control that is.