I'm surprised I hadn't heard a squeak about this project, but it sounds fascinating.
According to the blurb on the very minimalist preview page:
"Bento organizes all your important information in one place. So you can manage your contacts, coordinate events, track projects, prioritize tasks, and more — faster and easier than ever before."
However, judging from the screenshots, it appears to do more - providing templates for home inventory and other household databasing needs.
As a longtime Filemaker user (I did my wedding database on it, for example), I really like the way they've consistently made databasing easy for the rest of us. Bento seems to promise to be even simpler, and the idea of a personal database program, for handling contacts, personal media, etc. is an interesting and long-overdue one, but I'm curious to see just how powerful and useful it is. Is it just a glorified PIM, or much more than that? Can it be used to implement GTD (something that Mail's built-in to-dos fall miserably short of)?
Anyway, there's a downloadable preview available, that seems to be close to final (since the app itself is to be released in January 2008). No time to try it out tonight, but will kick the tires in the coming days.
BTW it's Leopard only.
My first (negative) impressions of Bento are in this post.
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