Search Results for 'bento'

[cgranley]

Yes, I imported Bento number data that had currency symbols in it.

I have exported to a csv, cleaned out all the $ symbols, and then re-imported into a new DB with the same structure. No fix. Still have many “NaN” showing. The csv file I am importing from has no data, zero, nothing, between the commas.

This makes me think something in the database structure is causing this as I duplicated and renamed the original DB, leaving a new, empty DB prior to importing the csv.

[hmansion]

Brendan,

First let me say thanks for the iPad app – I purchased it last night. Had been evaluating different apps for a couple of weeks to store my recipes and decided making my own database would best suit my needs. While the functionality of Tap Forms HD certainly offered what I needed, the *primary* reason I chose your app over Bento and others is because of this forum. I am so impressed by your consistent, helpful and professional presence here and wanted to let you know you’re doing a great job!

First field on my form is a photo field and I can choose from 3 different thumbnail sizes in list view – perfect! Do I have any control over the image size on the actual record itself? Can you explain the display rules of an image (i.e. it’s always shown half size; it’s always full size unless it exceeds XXX x YYY pixels then it’s compressed to XXX x YYY; etc.)?

Just like with thumbnails, I would love to normalize images to a set dimension on the form if possible…

Thanks! – Steve

[enver]

Hi Brendan,
thank you for your reply. I’m using the Mac version of the app.
In my case, my calculation goes as follows:
A + B = C
(D * 2) + C = E
I can do this with Bento, even with MS Word.

Best regards,
enver

[PatrickV]

Hello,

I have two small feature requests for the Mac version.

-Moving Fields-
It would be nice to have the option to have fields side by side, as you can do form example in Bento. The Form become a canvas where you can move fields on.

For example. I created a games collection form and like to add multiple screenshots side by side instead of among each other.

-Sharing form libraries-
It would be nice to have a website where users can share Forms.

[kofi1990]

Ok, but I think creating such a multi-user database woud fill a big market gap. I used bento before and it has just a wifi sync for 3 devices…
There is no app in the appstore…

By the way, is it possible to male the icloud sync easier? For example a pull-to-sync like in mail.app?

Thanks for the fast support :)

[Brendan]

I would like to have the feature to be able to combine strings into calculations. I am using a math parsing library right now which does not support strings. But I’m sure I can do something to modify that. It would be great to have that.

I’m not sure what you mean by URLs cannot be carried into fields.

Thanks!

Brendan

[iNotes4You]

Hi Brendan.
I will continue my comparison about mobile databases soon on http://iNotes4You.com.

(1) Assessing Bento (FileMaker) I saw a feature which should be implemented in Tap Forms too. It’s the extension of calculated fields to String operations like adding strings, adding constant strings to fields, taking the left, right or mid part. At the time I use Microsoft Access to generate desired fields, Export the data in CSV Format and reimport them into Tap Forms. That’s a pretty boring task.

So my question is: Are string operations in your timeline?

(2) When using the integrated browser URLs cannot be carried into fields.
It’s indispensable when using a form for collecting information found in the internet.

Thanks in advance.

[Philippe De Leersnijder]

Brendan,

To go further on your example of the patient and medications.

In a many-to-many you can list from ONE patient ALL his medications.
But, from ONE medication, to see ALL patients using it.
That does not work.

I’m using Tapforms against Bento.
Bento does has bi-directional relations.
Meaning, changing something in the medications, immediately is available for all patients using it.

Tapforms has one big major advantage, icloud sync.
I use Tapforms on iPad and iPhone, that works amazing.

Please consider my question of bi-directional links.
That makes Tapforms against your competitors miles ahead.
For Bento, I would have to buy a MAC to let iPhone and iPad synchronizing.
If you would forsee bi-directional relationships, what an advantage !
Now my Bento on iPhone is unused, as I can not import anything.

Greetings from Belgium,

Philippe

[paulwebb]

I see, other apps place a unique identifier in a separate field in the apple contacts. Example for us is pocket infomant.
Strange that apple make database integration so difficult, its the same for filemaker, bento and the rest. Wake up apple. Some of us run businesses.

[Brendan]

Hello Jolin,

Thanks for the suggestions. One thing that’s different between Bento and Tap Forms is they don’t use a tab bar interface. They have that row of buttons at the bottom for doing various tasks (such as adding a new record). I could change Tap Forms to work that way on the record edit screen which would provide more space for more buttons. But then if you wanted to get to other areas of the app you’d have to back-out to the list view of records before being able to do that. I’m not sure which is better. For now that’s why I have the action menu with all those other commands you can perform on the record details screen.

I’ll look into the swipe issue.

Thanks,

Brendan

[jolinwarren]

[Sorry for three posts, but I thought it better to split them out by topic instead of lumping them into one.]

I often need to add multiple new records in sequence. So I add a record, fill in the details, and then want to add another record. Currently in Tap Forms, after adding the first record, I have to go back to the record list and then tap the add button or tap the arrow button and then tap ‘New’. Both take two taps What I’d like to do is have an add button in the new record screen so with one tap I can create a new record. I know it sounds like a small thing, and it is, but Bento has this and it was really convenient for me.

A related issue is that when creating a new record, you can’t go back or forwards to browse other records. The new record doesn’t seem to exist in the list of existing records until tapping the back button. Future edits of the record allow swiping backwards/forwards to other records. It would be more useful if a new record was automatically placed right after or before the most recently created previous record. I sometimes create a new record, fill in a couple of details, then want to check a previous record to before filling in the final details. Currently I have to go out of the record to get back to my list of records and then back into a record view. I’d like to be able to just swipe through to get to a previous record’s view. This is also something that was convenient about Bento (it has a persistent set of back/new/forward buttons on the record detail screen and new records are automatically placed at the end of other records).

By the way, these are only two of four things that were better about Bento, compared to a huge list of things that are far superior in Tap Forms, so I’m not recommending Bento or being down on Tap Forms. Just noting a couple of little things that I’d apparently got used to and found convenient. (For reference, the other two features in Bento but not in Tap Forms are collections and smart collections of records. And it sounds like Tap Forms will eventually support the latter, which is the most useful anyway.)

[Ben]

Hello,

I’ve been using Tap Forms Database for OS X since I saw it was released on the App Store — I was so pleased to see it released, as I was on the verge of buying Bento for want of an alternative. Tap Forms is much better, and from these forums and Twitter it seems as though the developer is very responsive!

I was looking for an application to help me organise photographs and PDF files for historical research, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate and decided that a database would be better so that I could tailor things to my exact requirements (hence my narrowly-aborted union with Bento). Tap Forms is fitting the bill very nicely so far, but there are a few things I’d like to ask about that, if solved, would make Tap Forms the perfect solution to my needs.

I have three tables (forms): ‘Documents’, ‘People’ and ‘Tags’.

Documents is used to store information about the document itself, such as published dates and locations, source, etc., along with the actual file itself. I also have two fields linking to the ‘People’ form. One field is for authors, and the other is for people who are featured within the document. I’m assuming that these are handled by Tap Forms as many-to-many relationships.

When I view the ‘Documents’ form, I’m very easily able to view the people I’ve associated to a particular record as authors or ‘mentioned people’, but I cannot work out how to display the inverse of the relationship, i.e. selecting record in ‘People’ and being able to see all of the documents it is associated/linked to as an author, mentioned person or both.

The closest I’ve come is adding a linked form field to the People form, and then manually adding the relevant documents. This is pretty laborious, and also makes it pretty easy for me to make mistakes! Is it currently, or if not will it be possible in a future version, to easily view many-to-many relationships?

Also, I often save articles from websites. I’ve found Safari’s export as PDF functionality to be a bit unreliable, and so I’ve taken to saving web pages in .webarchive format, which makes sense as the document is originally presented as a web page, anyway. I can add these to Tap Forms without any problem, but when I try to open them the following error is displayed: ‘”Document Name” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.’

It seems this error is invoked by Gate Keeper, as when I completely disable it, the message is not displayed and the .webarchive opens perfectly. I’ve tried holding command whilst opening the file with Gate Keeper turned on to MAS and third parties, but this does not work.

Is this likely to be a problem with Tap Forms, or is it Gate Keeper itself and thus something that cannot be worked around without the intervention of Apple?

Finally, I’ve been thinking about buying an iPad, which could serve as a nice way to read PDFs rather than printing them. If I bought Tap Forms for iPad and used the iCloud sync feature to browse my document library, is it possible to keep the database synced, but selectively download files? Or is iCloud document syncing an all-or-nothing proposition? I ask because once I’ve catalogued my document library, it will weigh in at several gigabytes, and while I’d consider paying for extra iCloud storage, I wouldn’t want it to gobble up all of the internal storage on the iPad!

Many thanks for your time and attention, and sorry for what has ended up as a wall of text!

[Tuur]

I’d love that too. The real time search of HanDbase in their list view and the options of Bento would be a perfect blend. ;-)

[Beaujangles]

Let me first state that I think tapforms is wonderful. Picked up the ipad version yesterday and I hope that we will be able to make it work for us.

We are looking for a way to take a record of customers’ orders offline at tradeshows and then import the records into our order management system for dispatch.

Because customers may order different quantities of various products with different unit prices, I am under the impression that a one-to-many linked form field type would be required. Each linked entry would represent a seperate orderline (SKU,Qty,Unit Cost,Subtotal).

Unfortunately, the export does not include the linked form entries and there appears to be no way to link the two seperate .csv files together.

Has anyone discovered a workaround? perhaps by mucking about with the .sqlite database file and exporting the relevant data?

Or might there be some way to link the two forms by something that could easily be vlookuped in a spreadsheet?

Without this functionality, I’m afraid that tapforms won’t be of much use to us and I may have to look at going over to the Bento camp *shudder*. Only two weeks to the next trade show and there’s no way we can continue to put the orders on sheets of paper to be entered at a later time as we have in the past.

Perhaps the mac app will provide some functionality to help make this work for us. This functionality would make it an instant-buy!

I’m sorry for what is essentially a repost, but I really need to come up with an elegant, easy-to-use solution – and it appears that Tap Forms is just so close to fitting the bill!

Thanks for reading.

[Honolulu Guy]

As a user of Bento, I’m contemplating switching to TapForms. One of my fields includes a picture that I take of my subject matter. Is there a way to show that photo in the left hand column within the records list view?

This would be great for anyone who needs to quickly scan through their photos to find the record in question, rather than having to tap on each one. It could be used to identify infections on patients, different types of trees, even barnacles on a whale! Of course, TapForms would have to “shrink” the photo and display a smaller version in the records list view.

Thanks!