Bento for Ipad

CanCan, 17 July 2010,
Categories: Air travel, Guest posts, Reviews

guest review by Craig Hartin

I have used Bento on the Mac for a while. I was very excited to see that it was an available app for the iPad.

I mainly use Bento to help keep track of projects that I am currently involved with at work.

It is also a great way for me to keep up with all of my travels and schedules for both work and home.

I want to start by talking about the Contacts, I am a fan of Apple Contacts and was a little worried about going to something new.

But Bento made that easy and automatically pulled in all of my Apple Contacts into Bento. This was great because I didn’t have to do anything to import them or organize them. On top of that there is a lot more options for information to be added than what you are given with Apple Contacts.

My concern was what was going to happen when I need to add a new contact and have it in my Apple Contacts list as well. Guess what, it automatically adds it in to the Apple Contacts when you close out of Bento.

Another great feature is being able to send emails directly from Bento without having to leave the program; just click the email address of the person in the contacts of who you want to email and a pop-up window comes up for you to email them.

The biggest thing that makes Bento great is how customizable the libraries are.

The program comes with dozens of prebuilt libraries that are all customizable. But, if you don’t find what you are looking for you can build you own.

I was in need of one to keep up with flights, so I began to customize my own.

bento1

I created lines for flight numbers, date and time of the flight as well as check boxes for confirmations for hotels and rental cars.

This has proved very useful when things get a little crazy in the day to day of traveling.

I was also able to add URL address as a column to put in information about the hotel or a conferences that I would be attending.

Some of the obvious templates really do come in handy as well.

The To Do list, for example, is one that I started using right away.

I was never a fan of it on my desktop computer because I was always on the go and would forget to check in and see what I had to do.

On the iPad I can check things off as I go, or change them to task for the next day if needed.

bento2 I did find myself making a grocery list with it the other day too. I carried it through the store as I shopped. Not the most convenient way to use Bento.

Sure, it was great to have a list of what I needed, but I found that not being able to have large enough typing columns is a bit of a problem and I hope that with an update they will adjust this to be able to display all of what is in your list or column.

Overall, Bento is a great app for the iPad. I find myself attached to the iPad and this makes it even easier to stay on top of projects, travel and even my groceries (if I wish).