Both Numbers and Bento have default templates titled “Expenses”. E.g., one of Numbers’s default templates is “Event Planner” one of Bento’s is “Event Planning”. Much of what Numbers can do is really ad-hoc database design and storage. Rejected not because it wasn’t good, but because it overlaps too much with Numbers.

There are a slew of recent apps from indie developers that take visual cues from the UI of the iWork suite there’s no reason to think FileMaker’s developers aren’t just as likely to do the same with a brand new app.Īnother possibility that springs to my mind, though, is sort of the opposite of Jalkut’s scenario: that perhaps Bento began life with the idea of it being included in iWork, but it was rejected and spun out on its own. It’s also equally possible that Bento has been an original product from FileMaker all along, and that its visual similarities to iWork apps are just that, visual similarities. Ships a consumer-oriented database app, they want to be the ones Because FileMaker is theĭatabase subsidiary of Apple, you can be damn sure that if Apple When somebody gets whiff of the news over at FileMaker and “database for everyday use.” It looks a lot like the other iWorkĪpplications in form and function. So the iWork team at Apple starts putting their work into the No question Bento looks a lot like an iWork app - the template picker for a new Bento library is a dead ringer for the template pickers for new documents in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Pulls out their dusty copy of ClarisWorks and says, “Wait a They scroll down the list of “office suite”Īpplications and check them off as they ship. Were sitting around planning the future of the iWork suite ofĪpplications. Lot like what might have come about if some strategists at Apple What inspired this? I can imagine a few scenarios. Daniel Jalkut has some astute observations regarding Bento, FileMaker’s new “personal database”:

Bento filemaker