How many records can you have?

[sarah bob]

Hi I have been looking into purchasing your Apps for Mac, iPhone and iPad. I currently use Bento for a recipe collection and am aware I need to move. Each record is a recipe and has various fields which I can search for e.g. ingredients, month, vegetarian, course, kids, etc. If it is from a magazine I scan it and have the PDF file link in the record. I currently have 1,638 recipes and a massive pile to add!
Q1 How big can I go with Tap forms (I seem to remember Bento could go to 10 or 20,000?)
Q2 Will I be able to link PDF files to the record? I don’t do the thing were you can see the PDF in the record, I just double click and the PDF opens. Sorry if that isn’t very technical, I don’t know the lingo!

Thanks

[Brendan]

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for your interest in Tap Forms.

There’s no problem for Tap Forms to handle 1638 recipes. I have some forms that have over 20,000 records in them, but it gets pretty chunky at that time. Chunky is a technical term for slow :-) But this is an area that I am always working to improve. The latest test I’ve been doing has about 40,000 records in it, but so far on my Mac it’s taking about 13 seconds to load that form. That’s too slow for my liking, but I am working on improving that. I also have a fairly fast MacBook Pro with an SSD drive. With slower drives, that time would be slower, possibly even twice or three times as slow depending on your computer. You should be pretty safe with your existing data and things will only get better over time as I improve Tap Forms.

As for linking PDF files, certainly, you can do that with a File Attachment field in Tap Forms. When you double-click on the file, Tap Forms Mac will open it up in your default PDF reader. On the iPhone and iPad version, you can view it right within Tap Forms.

Thanks!

Brendan

[1Levite]

I’ll toss in my experience. I have about 13000 records each having about 30 fields of various kinds (but not very heavy in media). These used to reside in Bento 1, 2, 3, and 4. Bento was really chunky, if not coagulated, with this record set. After bringing these into TF and taking advantage of some more efficient form organization, I can report far faster response (with TF) on my old chunky 2007 iMac. Superb performance on our modern macbook air. You should be fine with a growing recipe collection, in my opinion.

[Brendan]

Thanks for chiming in 1Levite. That sounds good. I know for sure that I can do better with performance though. In time…

Thanks!

Brendan

[Author]

Posts