Bento

[sleigh]

Over the years, I've fiddled with various programs, trying to create a decent database set-up for writing, one that would give me the information I want in the way that I want it, in a halfway attractive manner. I wanted a way to track titles, word counts, bylines, genres, story types, payments, expenses, publications, royalties, submissions, dates, etc -- and return that information to me in several different ways: by title, by year, by total counts and amounts, etc. I wanted all the info together rather than in twelve random places in my office and files. No one seems to make the 'perfect' writer's database.

I started out on paper, of course, but my first 'electronic' effort was with HyperCard, Apple's late and lamented card-based database program. Back in The Day, I was pretty good at HyperTalk programming, the programming language for Hypercard, and put together a stack that worked fairly well for a long time. However, it still required some occasional double and even triple-entry to get all the information set up. And Apple abandoned HyperCard along the way, and I never made the jump to SuperCard, the third party rival to HyperCard.

Instead, I went to an Excel spreadsheet. That performed well enough, but again -- a spreadsheet is not a database, and it required a fair amount of double-entry to get all the information into the right places, and some of the reporting was clumsy. That's what I've been using (though I'd lately migrated from Excel to Numbers, Apple's spreadsheet program.

But I picked up Bento also recently. Bento is a more graphically-based, consumer-friendly "little brother" of Filemaker Pro, Apple's full-bore relational database. (For those who are into Japanese culture, Bento is also a single-portion 'boxed lunch' that can be incredibly elaborate and artistic.) Now, I'd thought of picking up Filemaker at some point and giving a 'real' database a try, but always hesitated at the learning curve. So I thought I'd try Bento...

I spent much of yesterday putting things together. It wasn't altogether easy; none of the templates were of any use whatsoever, so I was working from scratch, and frankly, the PDF documentation sucks. It took me awhile (and an accidental "Ah-hah!") to figure out that I had to set up separate libraries to hold the various types of information and then link the main 'entry' pages to them. But... at the moment, it looks pretty decent (actually very Hypercard-like), and hey, with one exception, there's no need for double-entry. Ever.

There's still fiddling to do, and some more things I want to try with it, and undoubtedly I'll come across something that I want it to do that it won't do. But right now, it appears I have a new writing database...

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Hey, you can do something like Coverflow in Bento? I WANT that. How to?

K.