Enron was a public company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

There isn't anything more grateful than prospects on glossy paper!

--sd

Omilord ROFLMAO.

ah...capitalism.

Sure but the only reason you know about it is because it was a public company. As a private company it may not have come under as much scrutiny especially with the lack of transparency requirements and lower levels of oversight.

On the otherhand, shareholders tend to be relatively short sighted in terms of demand for profit and immediate performance, though maybe it could be bought out by a private equity group at that point lol.

OK... let me first say that I feel all of the frustrations I've heard here. Especially comment's note about FileMaker 9 not being ready for Leopard with some other FileMaker product being well in the works. I guess I just feel that we shouldn't judge FileMaker so quickly without having all of the information. My personal guess is that there are folks at FileMaker dying to tell us exactly what is up but can't for various reasons... as far as Bento goes.. it seems like a cool FileMaker offshoot that is highly similar to demos I've seen at Devcon. I think FileMaker should branch off, experiment, and for THE FIRST TIME in years make an out-of-the-box tool that goes beyond the FileMaker demos. Believe me, there are things about the FileMaker application that I really wanted to see in version 9, but I challenge you to release your guard and entertain the proposition that perhaps Bento might be a good thing for the corporate creativity as well as the developer community. At least give them credit for trying to innovate.. and if you have to express your disagreement, please try to use constructive criticism and try to see where they might possibly have been going with Bento.

p.s.... do we fault Apple for working on the iPhone while they could be making better MacBook Pros ?? how can we just expect that FileMaker, the company, should devote 100% of its resources to our needs?

p.s. when I saw Bento, I kinda thought this might bode well for what we might see in FM10

p.p.s. can anyone tell me why the video in the Bento Intro video is so god awful?

Edited November 24, 200718 yr by Guest

do we fault Apple for working on the iPhone while they could be making better MacBook Pros ?? how can we just expect that FileMaker, the company, should devote 100% of its resources to our needs?

Lol, well the one difference is that FileMaker the company is named after the product... or the other way around, but whatever. On a completely unrelated note though, the iPhone is freakin awesome (posted this reply off an iPhone - the forums actually hold up really well ).

In any case, I don't think anyone is blaming the developers, but rather people are simply airing repeated frustrations with FMI's support strategy and FM's damned UI tools.

Edited November 24, 200718 yr by Guest

... and if you have to express your disagreement, please try to use constructive criticism and try to see where they might possibly have been going with Bento

I have nothing against FM expanding and being innovate but constructive criticism according to you or me or whom? Oh, poor FileMaker, we are picking on them; get real...

Leaving an obvious break (since 8.0) in a solution past two FULL VERSION UPGRADES plus one updater is simple slop and if we Developers did that in our work we'd be out of business. They do not fix it because it doesn't pay as well as designing something new ... simple economics. Don't even try to suggest that we're picking on FM because we happen to disagree. I think the criticism is quite deserved!!

When given OBVIOUS examples of a barefaced bug, at least fix the puppy! I'm excited about FM expanding; I'm excited about Bento; I've cut them slack until I've hung myself with their poor decisions. FileMaker, at least clean up the obvious messes in your own house before taking on the world.

I don't know about others, but since you picked me as an example, I have to say you have completely misconstrued my remark. I am not frustrated, and I place no blame on FMI's delay in supporting Leopard. Anyone who has followed the announcements of "Leopard-ready" by various software providers knows that FMI is not alone in this - even Apple themselves weren't ready with some of their apps. And I have nothing against FMI trying to innovate. How they spend their resources is their business, not mine. All I ask for is a decent product, with decent support.

Since you have chosen Apple for comparison, let me point out that the latest update to Tiger (which along bug fixes includes some new features) was released AFTER Leopard. Apple did this on their own - nobody had to write to them or complain in forums. And should we talk about how Apple supports its developers?

I really regret and find it sad that we are having some sarcastic people on board of this forum.

Hey budd! Where's your sense of humor?? LOL

PS: What - besides IRONY - can keep us sane, working with stone-aged FileMaker... eh?

Keep in mind that the Leopard bugs aren't totally FileMaker's fault. Apple screwed developers this time around by refusing to give them software development kits until Leopard hit the shelves. Thus FileMaker wasn't able to test FileMaker 9 until after Leopard came out.

As for Bento, from a business point of view it makes sense. Its generally a good idea to diversify. As long as you don't overextend yourself that is. Also, I'm sure most developers understand that sometimes its easier to develop a new solution than patch an old one. Thus it was probably easier and faster to develop Bento than to patch FileMaker 9.

Ultimately, what's done is done and life goes on.

I must say that I've been amused at some of the comments regarding Bento, FMI and Apple. Who said that real FMI employees developed Bento? (1) There are many dozens of little companies doing all kinds of things for FMI and Apple. (2) Since Jobs killed off AppleWorks a database was missing from a good replacement. Apple provided Keynote, Pages and Numbers. Since FMI was the database branch and stood to benefit from the connection, Bento was released by the more logical choice. (3) I also think that we need to leave room for another element -- the ideas of Steve and those that serve him. (4) Finally, it's a product that had a development cycle that matured alongside of Leopard.

Now the interesting question which remains to be seen -- will some of what we see in Bento appear in a cross-platform product like FileMaker Pro 10?

I don't know about you but I had been hearing about what became Bento for quite a while.

Enough said.

As the saying goes, you can say anything you want your last day at Apple.

Does anyone know how Bento links with Apple's address book and ical? What files does it reference and how?

Bento uses the data that is stored in MySQL Lite which is the basis for storing data in Apple's address book and ical.

For what its worth its stored in SQLite which isn't affiliated with MySQL (from my knowledge).

Does anyone know how Bento links with Apple's address book and ical? What files does it reference and how?

I would suspect they are using the programming interfaces built-into MacOS, see Address Book interace.

If they were reading the sqlite3 files directly, Bento would break the next time there's a schema change in the database for the Address Book (or iCal) - I doubt they would want that.