FileMaker Bento
» see filemaker.com/products/bento/ as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obit ~
bento needed a mac. in 2008 i was on a windows desktop in ankara on a ttnet adsl line, and the database i actually used for anything was excel. honestly. mac penetration in turkey in those days sat well under five percent and the consumer-tier mac software lineup never really reached the country at retail (or whatever it was called).
filemaker inc., the apple-owned database subsidiary that had carried the filemaker pro brand since 1995, shipped a bento public preview on 13 november 2007 and a 1.0 release at macworld on 8 january 2008. the price was forty-nine dollars for a single license, ninety-nine for a five-pack family license. the pitch was filemaker pro without the schema-design learning curve, ready-made templates for contacts and recipes and projects and library catalogs and class schedules.
in those days. version 2 in october 2008 added the link with apple's address book and ical. version 3 in september 2009 added file attachments and themes. version 4 in november 2010 added the iphone and ipad clients, syncing through icloud or wifi. by version 4 the product had picked up a small base of teachers and hobbyists running a customer list on a mac at home.
filemaker announced the end on 31 july 2013. sales closed on 30 september 2013, technical support ran out 30 july 2014, and after that the binaries kept running on whatever mac you had installed them on until a system upgrade broke something. data could be exported as csv or migrated into filemaker pro with the bento template library mostly converting cleanly into starter solutions.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | 8 January 2008 at Macworld (preview 13 November 2007) |
|---|---|
| Peak | $49 single license, $99 five-pack family license, iPhone and iPad clients from version 4 |
| Killed | 30 September 2013 sales end, 30 July 2014 support end |
| Lifespan | About 5 years 8 months |
| Made by | FileMaker Inc. (now Claris, a subsidiary of Apple) |
| Killed by | Thin consumer database market on Mac and a refocus on FileMaker Pro |
~ what it was actually for ~
bento let you build a small relational database without writing schema, by dragging fields into a form that looked like a paper index card. it linked to mac apps so a project record could pull in the meeting that scheduled it and the photos that documented it. apple's consumer software lineup in 2008 was unusually wide and bento sat near [[apple-iweb]] and ilife as the home-productivity tier. by 2013 most of those products had gone or were going.
~ what replaced it ~
filemaker the company became claris again in 2019, named after the 1987 software subsidiary apple had spun out and folded back in. the bento name did not come back. some of the template ideas surfaced in filemaker pro starter solutions, but the dedicated forty-nine dollar consumer tier was retired and never replaced. what filled the gap on mac was not one product. excel kept its half, and notion and airtable a few years later picked up the build-a-database-by-clicking half. the part bento did well, a small box on one machine that did not require a server or a subscription, became unusual.
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