Bento 3

Funny that this would ship this week. It occurs to me that Bento is a great example of the sort of thing I wish Adobe would do. FileMaker — the product, not the company — is old and big and cross-platform and there are tons of professionals who depend upon it. Bento isn’t a replacement for FileMaker; it’s a do-over alternative. FileMaker’s forte is in approachable visual database software. Bento is their answer to the question, “What would we do if we were starting over from scratch for the Mac today?”

Adobe shouldn’t scrap its existing software any more than FileMaker Inc. should scrap FileMaker. But where’s Adobe’s “Bento” for bitmap and vector image editing for the Mac? The Bentos in this space are coming from indie developers with apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, Lineform, and Opacity.

★ Wednesday, 30 September 2009