Bento and iPad: The Start of Something New

Bento is a great companion for iPad: both of them demonstrate the beginning of a new chapter in software development. I know we've periodically had new chapters in software development (game changers, killer apps, and The Next Big Thing--all thousands of them), but this time it's real.

Don't take my word for it, take a look at the software. Bento on the Mac (it doesn't run on Windows), is a terrific personal database. The folks at FileMaker put their decades of database expertise into a new product that defines a specific space and fills it with features. You can see it in action here.

This interface is a great example of contemporary interface design: it's compact and powerful. The screen shot doesn't show the menu bar, but that's OK -- it's really not that important. And besides, menu bars are so 20th century (more than a decade ago by now). Instead of having to drag that mouse pointer all the way around your screen to find the command you want to execute, the commands are right on the screen and right where you want to use them.

Take a look at the bottom of the main part of the screen: the form tools duplicate menu commands that are getting a little long in the tooth. Instead of the effort of going up to the Insert menu and choose the Text Box command, if you want a text box, you click Text Box in the form tools at the bottom of the screen, and there you have a new text box in your form.

Not interested? No big deal, click the Show/Hide Form tools button in the lower right of the window frame (it's the second from the right). 

Commands usually act on what you have selected in the window. That's the routine--select, then choose a command. It's been that way since the first graphical user interface (generally dated to the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981) in 1981. If you have not selected something that a command needs to do its work, that command is grayed out in the menu bar.

Today, that gear wheel you see in the lower left of the main part of the window is all over the place. Instead of graying out unusable commands in the menu bar, the gear wheel pops up a menu of commands that -are- usable.  If only two commands make sense at a given time, you've got two commands in the list. It's part of the move to streamline and focus interfaces. We've come a long way since 1981!

--Hold on a moment, I have to take this call--

Somehow, telephones became computers, and the interface that became so streamlined, compact, and elegant had to be reinvented again. Some developers just tried to squash desktop interfaces onto cell phones, but the results ran the gamut from tragic to comic--desktops don't fit on a device you can put in your pocket.

With iPhone, the folks at Apple started to rethink the user interface in the context of a small and portable device. They also made it very easy to synchronize data between a computer and an iPhone. To no one's great surprise, the Bento team took the new interface and added it to Bento along with synchronization.

Part of the challenge of the small screen on iPhone is fitting everything in. The desktop design that tries to make everything accessible at a glance, just doesn't work. Instead, very space-efficient tools help you quickly navigate through what may be two or three screens to get to the data you need. Bento on iPhone provides a great deal of the desktop functionality, but it uses this new interface. For example, take a look at the same records shown previously when you look at them on iPhone.

Here's the main record -- it's got the fields you select, and it provides links to related records.

For each set of related records (Conversations and To Do Items), you can see how many there are, whereas on the desktop, you just see the records. But the speed of iPhone is so fast, and the interface -- your finger taps -- is so simple, it's no big deal to step through a couple of extra screens. Next you see a list of the related records.

See how that right-pointing arrow always points to more detail? This interface is if anything more intuitive and consistent than the desktop one. One final tap gets you to the data for an individual record.

It's the same data you saw on the desktop, but this time instead of viewing it with one mouse click, it's four finger taps.

Bento for iPhone is not a replacement for Bento on the desktop: it's a terrific companion. (In fact, I use it for my to-do list in preference to any other tools. That's because my iPhone with Bento on it is with me more often than any other device.)

But with the launch of Bento for iPad, there's a third interface in the works, and something interesting has happened.

There's another interface, as befits the new device, But what's really interesting is that its elements are remarkably different from what we've seen before. Perhaps the biggest innovation has to do with lists. On the desktop we scroll them with scrollbars. On iPhone, we flick through them with a fingertip. And on iPad...well, have a look.

Here's the same Bento library you saw before when you run it on an iPad.

You see the list of libraries at the left when the iPad is horizontal, and you see an individual record at the right. Because there's more space, instead of just seeing that there are six related records as you do on iPhone or seeing more details as you do on the desktop, you see the first handful of them.

Because the iPhone and iPad both recognize orientations, just rotating the iPad 90 degrees simply hides the list of libraries.

Now comes the fun part. Tap one of those related records, and you see its data in a window in front of the main window (a popover in iPad terms).

What do you think the most important interface element is on the popover? It's those arrows at the bottom that take you to the next or previous related record (they're dimmed for the last or first related record).

You've just seen the 21st century version of a scrollbar. You've got the list that you can flick through, but this is a fast way of -- in effect -- scrolling through data. It allows you to see more than a single line in a scrolling list does.

The iPhone and iPad interfaces to Bento reflect an important difference between those devices and a desktop: your hands are on your data, because your data is in your hand. (For righties, your data is in your left hand and your right hand is free to tap.)

In all of the screenshots, you're looking at the same data. The different interfaces are intuitive for the device you're using at a given moment, and the built-in synchronization takes care of making your data consistent. If you step back a bit and think about it, you can see the real achievement here: its all about the data. The only thing that is the same from screenshot to screenshot is the data.

And that's all you care about.

Copyright 2010 by Jesse Feiler. Contact jfeiler@northcountryconsulting.com for reprint and distribution.