Needless to say it’s no fun. And outside of a niche market for data crunching geeks and masochists, the average home user has little interest in spending their Sunday afternoon learning the fundamentals of fields, forms, and recorded lists. Wouldn’t it be great if some daring company were to forge a rich database application so easy to use and visually intuitive that even common peasants could learn?

Well someone did, and the shocking part is it wasn’t Apple! Well, not directly anyway (FileMaker is a subsidiary of Apple).

Who did what now?

No, the credit for this phenomenal application goes to FileMaker; a name synonymous with brawny database software. FileMaker is no stranger to the database community. Its professional suite, aptly named FileMaker Pro, is long cherished in the Mac community as the premiere database application for that platform, and its Windows counterpart is kicking numbers and taking names as well. Nobody knows database quite like this company.

This time around FileMaker has pit its brain trust against the under-exploited consumer market; laying waste to complexity by designing a simple elegant database package built for the average joe. What they’ve developed is something so well conceived, and so seamlessly integrated into the Mac experience, you’ll mistake it for one of Apple’s very own iWork apps.

The product is called Bento, and despite its silly name, this app is no box of raw fish. In a nutshell Bento is exactly what it claims to be; a personal database app for home and small business. But it’s actually more than that. Having tested the product, I’m convinced it’s a category killer that fills an apparent void left between iWork’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. With Bento’s simple prebuilt templates and richly intuitive interface, anyone can hit the ground running, immediately organizing personal lifestyle information. Never loose track of your Elvis memorabilia again.

When launching Bento for the first time you’re greeted with a clean, familiar, iWork-like interface. A sidebar on the left-hand side displays your databases and collections, which can be organized and arranged according to personal preference. The top portion of the window shows various form view options; table, overview, details, and so on. Below that is the main record window for viewing and editing entry data. At the bottom is a small toolbar for adding and eliminating records, as well as an interface layout control. That’s it. No clutter, no kludge, just a clean canvas.

Wax on, wax off

To get started, simply add a new library or collection from the file menu, or the initial welcome wizard, and select from one of many predefined database categories. Bento offers many “shake n’ bake” templates for common database types, ranging from event planning, home inventory, customer invoices, student lists, and vehicle maintenance, just to name a few. Simply click on any one of those options to build your collection. After that, you’re ready to roll. Just input your data into the predefined field variables and hit save. If you need a specific field that isn’t available in the default template, add your own.

This is where the magic happens. By clicking the “customize” icon in the upper right corner of the screen, a slide-out panel is revealed offering a list of prefab form field choices. Say you want a field for inserting photos into your home inventory entries. Just click and drag the media field marked “Photo” in the right sidebar to any location you wish to place it in the entry window, and release the mouse button. Voila! Easy as Paris Hilton.

Even media, both audio and video, can be added to a form as well. I can see a usage scenario for YouTube producers and podcasters using Bento to organize and catalog their uploaded video collections and audio archives instead of having source video files strewn hither and yonder across storage devices.

Bento Theme Transition effect from Kent Pribbernow on Vimeo.

Another really great feature is the ability to format records with themes. Themes are collections of color schemes, font styles, and backgrounds that give your entries a different look and feel. More than 21 different options are available to personalize to your heart’s content. What’s more, Bento takes advantage of Leopard’s Core Animation technology, and presents you with a beautiful ripple effect when transitioning from one theme to another (see above video). No, it won’t make you anymore productive, but who doesn’t love a bit of eye candy?

Tip: Themes can be used to customize specific categories for better organization and faster identification. And they look cool too.

Of course, like any well healed database app, Bento is more than just eye candy and training wheels. The program boasts a number of really useful features such integration with Address Book and iCal, linking your contacts and events. And the ability to search through your records like nobody’s business.

Good enough to be called great

To the experienced database user this is all old hat, I know. But to the average consumer it’s empowering. And when held against that standard, Bento really stands out as a landmark product. It may not appeal to the power user, but Bento feels right at home on any personal laptop or small office desktop. And is yet another reason to use a Mac.

At just $49, it’s very competitively priced and worth registration. Bento gets my snob worthy seal of approval for innovation and simplicity.

To look at my blog and read my rapturous Apple exalting posts, you might assume that I am a long time Mac fanboy who gets teary eyed in the presence of an Apple IIc, or screams like a giddy teenage girl at the mere mention of SCSI drives. Nope. That was all long before my time. The truth is that I am a “Switcher”; A Windows user who converted to Mac. And even then only recently. My affinity for Apple grew over a number of years, culminating in the final decision to move to OSX as my primary platform, supplanting Windows. It didn’t happen overnight, and it almost didn’t happen at all.

How did I arrive at this point, you ask? Read about my long journey after the jump.

*Queue dream sequence music.*

It all began more than a decade ago, 1996 to be precise, when I purchased my first PC. Like most consumers, I wanted to get on the newly paved information superhighway, and a computer was required to ride it. My PC was a clunky beige tower made by a now extinct PC vendor named Magitronix. Powered by a classic Intel Pentium processor (the original) clocking in at an astounding 166mhz (this was 1996 remember), it had just 32MB of RAM and a “spacious” 2GB hard drive. I was completely new to personal computing and didn’t know a mouse from a modem, but I was young and had an insatiable passion for learning. And still do. Like fine wine, I improve with age – ignoring the bits of cork rot here and there of course.

That PC sparked my love for technology, and I became an instant geek. Microsoft’s Windows 95 was the state of the art OS at the time (and coincidently received almost as much animus among users as Vista), but my machine came with Windows 3.2 pre-installed, better known as Windows for Workgroups. I had nary a clue how to upgrade my OS, but I wanted Windows 95 if only to have the latest and greatest thing along with the satisfaction of running what everyone else was using. I didn’t want to feel left out after all. Before I knew it, I was learning the nuances of drivers, IRQ settings, and god knows whatever else it took to get my system fully Win32 compatible. After just 30 days of ownership, I was under the hood of my PC, armed with a screwdriver and sense of purpose, ripping out the default crappy OEM sound card that came with the system and replacing it with a superior Creative SoundBlaster16 ISA card. I had upgraded my PC all on my own.

I popped in the Windows 95 installation CD, loaded the OS, and was soon among the growing legions of Windows 95 users enjoying all the frills and benefits of 32-bit application support. I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant, I just knew that I wanted it. I was on the ground floor of new computing experience, and I loved every moment of it. I had not one, but two office suites installed on my system since I couldn’t decide which I like better among the two competing suites at the time; Office for Windows 95, and Lotus Smartsuite. Believe it or not, there was a time when office suites were actually exciting. Even more shocking, there was a time when Windows was exciting. Amazing, isn’t it?

I watched software design grow up, and entire industries created right before my eyes. PC Gaming evolved from basic 2D card games to advanced 3D shooters that revolutionized computer graphics, giving rise to the first dedicated graphics cards. At the time, PC graphics were 2D only. The first true gaming card for PCs came in the form of an add-on component, made by Diamond Multimedia, called Voodoo 3Dfx. I can still recall running to my local Best Buy, eagerly knocking over shoppers to get at this magical new Voodoo 3DFX card sitting on the shelf, when it first came out. And then enjoying the amazing graphics it unlocked with advanced 3D games like LucasArts first-person shooter, Jedi Knight. Ah, those were the days.

As time passed, and technology changed I followed along the merry upgrade path (or treadmill, such as it was) eagerly embracing every new technology that came along, from processors to graphics chips. Windows 95 was replaced by Windows 98. Windows was fun to use, it has to be said, and this was back in an age when Windows as actually an innovative and well liked technology, instead of the loathed bloatware of today. Windows was so widely adored among consumers and office workers that people enjoyed customizing their desktops with Windows 98 desktop themes, elaborately personalizing their workstations with wallpapers, color schemes, and sound effects. Anyone remember Windows Plus! packs?

There were pitfalls and pain points throughout, to be sure, but with each challenge Windows PCs threw at me, the more I learned and the more skilled I became. In some sick way I actually owe my professional life to Windows and all its problems. That got me into computing as a career, working for companies in various odd jobs as low-level IT worker to company computer geek. And I owed it all to the PC, Microsoft, and a love for technology. It was great to be a geek, or at least a PC user.

By the end of the 1990s I had outgrown Windows 98, and migrated to Microsoft’s more stable NT codebase when I got the opportunity to beta test Windows 2000 (NT5), still in its early stage of development. It looked the same but offered a quantum leap in stability and performance. Win2kPro, as it was affectionately known to its users, was arguably the best operating system ever put out by Microsoft, and was Windows at its zenith. Comically Microsoft’s confusing branding and use of calendar years to market OS releases led many consumers to mistake Windows 2000 Professional as an upgrade from Windows 98. I can recall notices hanging in the software aisles at Best Buy, warning consumers not to buy this software for their home PCs. One trade publication, I can’t recall which, called Win2k “the best Windows upgrade you’ll ever make by accident”. I had graduated to “Pro user” and earned my stripes as a hardware geek. Computing couldn’t possibly get any better than this.

Then there was Apple.

Like any serious PC user at the time, I viewed Macs with contempt. They were, in my view, inferior machines to be ridiculed and shunned for serious work, and rightfully so. Macs were toys. Apple machines at the time were horribly overpriced compared to comparable PCs, underpowered in terms of raw specs, and crippled by an OS that was simply inferior to Microsoft’s more advanced Windows 2000 Pro. MacOS 8, the OS that powered Apple hardware at the time, was primitive by comparison, and couldn’t even manage memory like a modern OS, relying on a byzantine management scheme known as collaborative memory where applications shared memory, and had to be manually allocated by the user. In plain language; Macs sucked. Yes I know there are those who will douse me with petrol and strike a match for saying that, but that’s the way I see it, and given the circumstances of the time, I think it’s a fair statement. I saw nothing in the Mac experience that could kindle the slightest interest in me. PCs were just better, plain and simple.

So how did I, a PC loving Windows fanboy, become a Mac lover? It started like this…

I was a tech news junky, since I had a deep passion for technology… even if it was technology that I loathed. And Apple was often featured on tech news sites like C|Net’s news.com (my favorite tech site at the time), and I frequently watched Steve Jobs keynotes if only to mock Apple products, like the original iBook that resembled a toilet seat – oh the laughter that brought. That laughter stopped one day eight years ago when Steve Jobs took the stage, at MacWorld 2000, and introduced something that blew me away: OSX. I can remember watching the live video stream of the event, with Jobs demoing each feature and nuance of this seemingly revolutionary new OS, and everything he showed left me captivated.

Animated windows that bend and shrink to the bottom of the screen – icons that scaled with every mouse gesture – a desktop layer based on Adobe PDF. “My God”, I thought, “this is like some wonderful dream! Except that Elizabeth Hurley isn’t laying beside me.” Nothing I had seen before compared to what I was seeing now. It wasn’t just eye candy either, OSX had serious plumbing under the hood and and advanced software stack on top. Apple had just changed the game, taking desktop computing to a new level. For the first time in my computing life, I looked at my Windows desktop and stopped liking what I saw. This new OS that Jobs was demonstrating seemed light years ahead of Microsoft. In that one instance I stopped laughing at Macs, and started questioning my own platform.

Since the introduction of the iMac I had a certain affection for Apple hardware design, minor though it was. The iMac was cute, but not something I wanted sitting on my desk. How could I appear credible to my colleagues while using a strawberry colored computer? But soon after Apple shipped OSX it revamped its professional line of machines as well; the PowerMac, introducing amazingly sleek looking enclosures with cutting edge designs. Now Apple had an OS that I was quickly falling in love with, wrapped in hardware that I found myself drooling over. And what did I have? I had an OS that looked like it was a decade behind and sitting inside a boring beige plastic box that looked equally outmoded. I was still a PC guy, but no longer loved the experience. The fun was done.

OSX had fractured my devotion to Windows, and Apple’s design aesthetic had me repulsed by the sight of beige. I wanted something better – I wanted a Mac. “No! I can’t do that, stop this crazy talk.” So went the inner monologue that happened within me each time I passed by an Apple retail display. It was painful. But despite my wavering allegiance to Windows, I remained a PC user in part because of my devotion to PC gaming. And when it came to gaming, and subsequent hardware support, Macs were not an option. So for now I would have to sit on the sidelines and admire Macs from afar. Then in 2002 I decided on a compromise. If I cannot make a wholesale plunge into the Mac platform, why not go halfway? I could buy a basic Mac, explore what Apple’s platform had to offer, and still use Windows as my primary platform. Briliant! So I purchased my first Apple computer, the original flat panel iMac. That beautiful little computer introduced me to OSX.

So began my schizophrenic arrangement with Apple and Windows as my creative side battled with my technical side. A PC sat on one side of my desk with a Mac occupying the other; a classic left-brain vs. right-brain metaphor. The Mac became my mistress, but I remained married to Windows, and part of me wanted a divorce. It was Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors that offered a turning point for me. Until that point a Mac and a PC were completely different things. Now they were one and the same, even running on the same hardware. At last I was no longer painted into a corner, forced to make a choice. I could simply select whatever software I needed for any given task, all on the same machine without the tradeoffs incumbent in dedicated systems.

So, in 2006 I ordered a Mac Pro. It offered all the qualities I wanted in a PC; performance, freedom and flexibility in hardware, with the software I wanted in a Mac. From then on I have lived a dual life in both camps. I still have two computers sitting on my desktop, Mac and PC, but much of my daily workflow has now moved to the Mac. The software environment is simply better and the experience is richer. Part of me still remains a PC hardware enthusiast, and probably always will. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that software is more important than the hardware it runs on. All the hardware in the world cannot make a bad OS better, or turn mediocre software into innovation. Vista proved that. Any operating system that makes my computing life richer and more productive is where I hang my hat, and for now OSX is my hatrack.

If Apple can turn a long time Windows enthusiast into a Mac user, they’re doing something right. And so my journey continues, and I remain “switched”.

Enjoy the MacBook pR0n. Visit my Flickr gallery for more photos.

Just when you thought your three month old Mac Pro was safe from obsolescence, Apple pulls the rug out from under your workstation. Today the company announced its long awaited dual quad-core system based on Intel’s new “Clovertown” Xeon processors. That’s four cores on a single die, totalling eight cores, for those of you whom are math challenged. I barely use the full potential my single quad core Mac Pro offers, let alone 8 bloody cores! Still, I can see real world applications for video professionals and science fields.

If you want one be prepared for sticker shock. The “entry level” 8-core model starts at $3,298. Fortunately standard dual-core models based on Intel “Woodcrest” Xeon remains available starting at a reasonable $2,200.

Jump to the link.

Somewhere in the halls of Apple UK, an employee’s ass is being handed to him, along with a pink slip.

An Australian MacBook owner got an unwelcome surprise – his beloved ivory white portable suddenly began emitting a hissing sound, and moments later spontaneously combusted. Leaving his MacBook char-broiled and blackened.

Poor little bastard. The MacBook I mean. View more photos of the deceased here.

Who can forget this charming ad from a red-eyed pothead Ellen Feiss, endorsing Macs, as part of Apple’s ill fated “Switch” campaign. I’ve seen this ad so many times and yet it continues to make me laugh each time. *sigh*

Ah, Sweet memories of advertising gone wrong.

Believe it or not, I don’t own a laptop. I generally have little need for a portable, as most of my work in done primarily in front of a workstation (actually two in fact). But on the odd occasion a laptop would be a welcome accessory. So I began researching various PC laptop models on the market today, notably Apple, and came away surprised. Apple is really behind the market. Dell and other PC vendors are offering portables for as low as $599, which include a 15.4″ widescreen display, while Apple is charging $1,099 for its consumer portable (MacBook) that only offers a confined 13.3″ widescreen. Now, I wouldn’t buy a Dell Inspiron or HP Pavilion notebook to save my life…they’re junk! But a gulf exists between these two products that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Granted, Apple’s products have always been premium priced. So this is nothing new. And historically you get much higher quality components in Apple’s machines which makes the higher sticker price worth the premium. But in this case it is the weak specs that have me alarmed. If Apple is charging me over a grand for a MacBook, so be it. But at least give me the same 15″ widescreen display that I would normally get from a bargain basement PC laptop for crying out loud!

At this point I can’t justify spending so much for so little, and intend to hold off for a while before making a purchase. Hopefully Apple will revamp its portable line soon, bringing it to more competitive terms.

Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro

• Steve Jobs loves to surprise the industry with his legendary “One more thing” product announcements. And nothing will give him greater pleasure than trumping Redmond by stealing publicity away from Microsoft with a surprise launch of Leopard.
• Apple is running out of dot releases. The latest system update to OSX Tiger is version 10.4.8. Now unless Apple plans on adding further incremental digits onto its builds, I don’t see how they can protract one further dot release another 7-9 months.
• Apple has recently been turning up the heat on Mac developers in an attempt to cajole them into getting their apps released for Leopard at the earliest possible date. I’ve received two emails from Apple’s Developer Connection program over the last couple weeks that boasted the benefits of supporting Leopard, and encouraging me to learn more about the new OS. This coincides with recent preview builds of Leopard to developers. Coincidence? Maybe.

Now, granted I don’t have any insider information to confirm my suspicions, but the pieces fit. Just as Apple surpised analysts and the media with a January release of Intel-based Macs early this year, which weren’t supposed to ship until Q2 of this year, history will repeat itself again this MacWorld with Leopard.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, OSX

Apple keeps finding more ways to drive me into bankruptcy. First they nickel and dime me with repeated assualts from iPod rollouts. Then they introduce the Mac Pro. Now comes a beefed up MacBook Pro running Intel’s latest mobile processor; Core 2 Duo. This release seems to be watered down as upgrades come; aside from a new processor under the hood, nothing significant has changed over the previous models. Even pricing remains the same.

My biggest concern is the much maligned heat issue that some users complain to be so hot, the laptop can literally be used as a portable grill top. If these machines run cooler and more reliably than its predecessor, then I might bite the bullet. As it is now I don’t own a Mac portable at all, in no small part to issues I keep reading about. We’ll see

Check out the new MacBook Pros here.

Technorati Tags: Intel, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo