Bento – What Does the Mac Lack?

There’s just one bad thing being a Mac user

I love my Mac.  I love the MacBook Air that I have now, I loved the MacBook I had before that, and I loved the iBook I had before that.  I love the way it looks and feels, I love that I can just close and open the lid at will without any tedious rebooting nonsense, and I love the amazing software that I can install.  There’s just one thing I don’t love about being a Mac user, and that’s the lack of consumer databases.

To put it bluntly, there is no equivalent of Microsoft Access for the Mac.  This upsets me, because I am a very organised geek, and I love nothing more than settling down to plan a database that will do exactly what I require. Seriously, I’ll get a pencil and paper out and start drawing entity relationship diagrams and everything.  Hey, some people torture cats in their free time – don’t judge me.

So far, the best Mac database application that I’ve found is Bento.  Created by the people who brought you Filemaker Pro, Bento is a cute little app with the user-friendly interface and intuitive functionality that Mac users expect.  Designed to interact with native Mac applications, Bento lets you merge information from your Address Book, iCal and Mail, and comes with funky built-in templates to make your data look pretty.

It’s aimed squarely at the consumer market, but a glance at their user forums makes it obvious that a lot of small businesses are also using it.  A slightly more in-depth look at the forums will also reveal Bento’s major flaw: it does not handle relationships between tables (or “Libraries”, as Bento calls them) well.  For example, I have a library called Articles, which contains details of things I have written.  I also have a library called Markets, which lists the various places that I have sent these articles to in the (usually vain) hope that they will publish them.

But there is no way for me to view a list of all of my articles, and all of the places that I have submitted them.  I can view them individually, by flicking through the library in form view.  Thus, I could easily see that my article “3000 Uses for a Domestic Frog” has been submitted to Frogs Monthly, Frogs Quarterly and The Daily Amphibian, and is awaiting a reply from each of them.  But I can’t easily see which of my other articles are also awaiting responses, unless I manually check through my library, one page at a time.  In Access, I would simply create a query that would return all of the articles with a status of “Awaiting response” – but Bento can’t handle this.

The makers of Bento would say that my needs are too complex, and that I should upgrade to Filemaker Pro.  But I’ve used this software before, and frankly, it scared the pants off me.  It’s a serious, powerful and at least to my mind, non-intuitive bit of software, far beyond my needs.  It also costs a couple of hundred quid – fine if you’re running a company, not so great for domestic use.  By comparison, Bento costs just £29, and with just a little additional capability, would be perfect.

There are, of course, other database applications for the Mac.  They include the free OpenOffice.org Base, the discontinued official Apple programe AppleWorks, and the open source suite Neo Office.  But so far, I haven’t found anything that combines the sleek functionality of most Mac sofware with the flexibility of MS Access.  It seems to me that there is a real gap in the market for a consumer database that combines the simplicity of Bento with the functionality of Access, without requiring you to make the leap to the massive power of Filemaker Pro.

Any suggestions?