Yesterday, I came across a Mac program called Bento. It’s a database application made by the Filemaker bods, and instantly interested me because a database application is the only thing I still need Windows for in day-to-day use. It’s also very cheap – around ¬¨¬£25.
I downloaded the demo, and had a bit of a play last night. It basically works just like the form designer in Access, but rather than having to create the fields in a table first, you can add them ad-hoc in the form and it sorts all the table nonsense out for you. It’s very easy to use.
OK, so for ¬¨¬£25 you’re not going to get an Access killer, and it has some limitations (not least that data isn’t stored in a file as such, but as a library tied to your machine), but it’s exactly what I need to replace my offline game database. I even managed to import the Access data (via a CSV export) and it sorted out the multiple-choice and checkbox fields admirably.
Looks like I’ll be shelling out for it now, and then I think I can ditch my Parallels-based virtualisation of my old PC completely. Hurrah!
I was on the test team, and whilst it sort of does the job for something as basic as storing a collection, it doesn’t do much else. Your education discount should get you a copy of FileMaker Pro 9 for <¬£100, which I would strongly recommend over Bento (obviously, since it’s my job to tell you that). Bento is to FileMaker what Notepad is to Word. Actually, if you’re interested in trying out FileMaker Advanced then email me.
I already have access (ha!) to Filemaker Pro, and while I’m sure it’s great and all, it’s complete overkill for my needs – a game database. Access was too, actually, but I had no alternative way back in ’99 when I originally set it up. Bento is perfect as it completely replicates everything I use my current Access database for, and although, as you say, FMP can be had for less than ¬£100, it can’t be had for ¬£25.
Actually, if I wanted to do anything more complicated than what Bento will allow, I’d be using MySQL locally anyway.
@deKay thanks for sharing! That’s one use case I haven’t been able to solve for using Notion.
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