By now, if you've got even a passing interest in things Apple, you'll have at least heard about Bento. It's a database application that looks and feels a lot like one of Apple's iWork applications. Bento's raison d'etre is database creation. As my friend Garry Barker mentioned in his column in The Age recently - "it's the database for the rest of us".

At the moment, Bento is available at now charge as it's still in beta. It'll cost under $100AUD when the final version is released early next year.

With software, the only way I can review it is to test it in real world conditions. For me, that means I need to create a database that I can use rather than some theoretical exercise. I could have used one of the many templates that Bento provides but I figured that creating my own thing would be more fun and a better way to put the software through its paces.

One of the new innovations in Leopard is the ability to directly read and write iCal and Address Book data. As Bento uses this new functionality it's a Leopard-only product.

The Old Way

As a freelance writer it's very important that track upcoming work. As a technology reviewer there are many elements I need to track for a story including

• deadline, length and payment information
• requests for review items and scheduled return dates
• billing status
• images I plan to use
• contact details for interview subjects, manufacturers, etc

Making sure I have all these things sorted out when I'm juggling up to half a dozen stories at a time can be tricky. Up till now, I've done this with spreadsheet. I simply sorted items by due date so that current tasks were at the top of the list and I had columns for recording all of the other information. It worked but meant that I had to review the spreadsheet regularly.

This wasn't a big deal but there was no way to get the spreadsheet to send me reminders and, given that all my appointments and other work is in iCal meant that I had information in more than one place - a sure way to ensure that something ended up getting missed.

The Bento Way

My project was to create a tool that allows me to track current and upcoming writing tasks. This tool would integrate with iCal so that my work queue would appear in my tasks lists. Given that Tasks now also appear in Mail it means that I can see what work I have from the application I use more than any other.

To start with, I made a list, on paper, of all the different things I needed to record. In database-spaek, these are the fields that I'll use to store data. These are

• Title or Topic*
• Publication
• Due Date*
• Payment
• Account Status (paid, due, overdue)
• Status (started, not started, cancelled)
• Completion date*
• Length
• Documents and Images
• Review Products
• Note*

Next, I launched Bento and looked at which fields in iCal Tasks already existed that could accommodate one of the data elements I needed. These are the ones marked with a star in my list.

Where Bento differs from other database tools is that it's able to augment the iCal Task and Events databases. The extra fields I need (the ones without a star) are new fields that will be associated iCal Tasks.

In Bento-speak, I needed to create a new Collection. This is a set of data that will reside within the iCal Task, iCal Events or Address Books data sets. I clicked once on iCal Tasks (which Bento calls a Library) and then, from the File menu, chose New Collection. I've named my new Collection Freeluncher Workplan.

By default, Bento creates a form using the standard iCal task information. By clicking the toolbox icon in the top-right corner of the screen I was able to start adding my new fields and rearranging the layout to suit my needs.

Adding my new fields was simply a matter of clicking the "+" button under the field list on the right side of Bento's screen. A simple, three step process prompts me to

1. Choose the type of field


2. Name the field


3. Set appropriate options

There are plenty of options that are quite self-explanatory and, while I could go through them all in detail, there's plenty of useful information in the help. I've used a combination of "Choice" (dropdown list), text and number (formatted as currency and as date).

One tricky thing was my desire to have a table within my form for a list of review products. I decided that the easiest way for me to do this was to create a new Library with the fields I wanted and to then add a "Related Records List" field to my form that referred to my new library. I'm sure there's a better way but for the moment it'll do.

After adding all the fields it was simply a matter of dragging and dropping fields from the list on the right side on to the form and then moving and resizing them to suit. Bento makes it easy to line things up nicely by automatically snapping the fields into line.

Once that was done all that was needed was some colour. A quick visit to the format menu revealed a long list of themes. Each theme uses colour and font combinations that can jazz things up. However, I did find that fields in the tabular "Related Records Lists" were hard to read with most of the themes I tried out.

The final step was to create some "Smart Collections". These are subsets of your data that dynamically update. For example, I wanted a list of all my open tasks so, from the File menu, I chose "New Smart Collection". I then added some criteria so that the only tasks that displayed were those where the status was either "Not Started" or "In Progress". I also created Smart Collections for Unpaid Accounts and Completed Work.

So, there you have it - my walk-through using Bento to help me get more organised. As all my workflow is now in iCal I can sync it to my mobile phone and access it from within iCal and Mail - applications that I always have active.

Bento is currently in beta. The final release is due early in 2008 and is expected to retail for under $100AUD. It is only for OS X 10.5 (Leopard).