Apple's FileMaker releases $4.99 mobile database to App Store

The new Bento for iPhone and iPod touch comes with about 30 pre-designed templates for on-the-go organization of car maintenance logs, expenses, recipes, and sundry other aspects of home and work life, said Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker's VP of marketing and services, in a briefing for Betanews.

Most, but not all, of the templates and features in the new mobile database are the same as those included in the desktop edition of Bento, first released at Macworld 2008 and updated in October with spreadsheet-like functionality.

While the Apple arm's FileMaker Pro database has long run across both Mac and Windows, the newer Bento desktop database is specifically designed for Mac OS X v. 10.5 Leopard -- and no database programming skills are required.

Rosenberg told Betanews that information in the desktop and iPhone/iPod editions of Bento can be synchronized both ways over a wireless connection, a function that comes in particularly handy if you don't want to punch in a lot of data on a mobile phone by hand. "But Bento for iPhone and iPod touch can also be used on a standalone basis," he added.

Rosenberg conceded that the mobile database might take a little getting used to for those unfamiliar with the Mac desktop. But he also suggested that learning to use Bento is kind of easy, anyhow.

Like the flagship Mac desktop edition, the mobile database lets users organize database records into "collections" -- along the lines of iTunes playlists -- of database records. Work-related templates in the mobile database include expenses, customers, time billing, projects, and equipment. Alternatively, people running their own businesses "as a sideline" might want to use other templates, such as inventory and "products for sale," Rosenberg said.

Templates for personal use include contacts, to-dos, diet log, classes, recipes, vehicle maintenance, and membership lists, to name a few.

"The 'collections' in Bento can also be mapped to a group of contacts," Rosenberg noted.

FileMaker's new iPhone app also comes with a blank template for creating unlimited numbers of custom templates. In a demo, Rosenberg showed Betanews a custom app he put together for a hypothetical real estate firm. The template incorporates a real estate property "ratings" field, plus a "to do" list with a reminder to agents to send out thank you cards to buyers.

Sync capabilities between the iPhone and desktop editions of Bento don't extend to Bento calendar items. But the mobile database does support built-in iPhone features encompassing contacts, calendar, mail, maps, camera, and the Safari Web browser.