It hasn't taken long for a major developer to announce a Leopard-only application.

FileMaker's Bento is a "personal database" aimed at organising your digital 'stuff' as well as more structured data such as an inventory of your possessions for home insurance purposes.

Why Leopard-only? The program uses several Leopard technologies, but a key consideration seems to be that Mac OS X 10.5 allows other applications to directly access Address Book and iCal data. We're not talking about exporting and importing, or sharing - Bento uses the actual data stored in these two applications.

Contacts and calendars are essential to a personal organiser, but having 'one version of the truth' is especially important. If you use Apple's Mail program, you have to use Address Book, so why would you want to keep a separate list of contacts elsewhere? (That should provide a hint for developers of accounting and other applications.)

Bento might just be the application that will make Apple's standard-issue software plus iWork competitive with Microsoft Office. Leaving aside concerns about the nth degree of compatibility, one of the things I like about Office (more specifically Entourage) is the way it can tie together emails, contacts, documents and other information that relate to a particular project. Bento apparently fills that gap.

So why does FileMaker think it can get away with a Leopard-only application? Obviously introducing a completely new program makes it a safer prospect than upgrading a existing product, but the interaction with Address Book and iCal is such a crucial idea that it justifies limiting the audience. Bento also uses other Leopard technologies such as core animation, so a Tiger-compatible version would have been a substantially lesser product.

The product is due to ship in January, by the way.

Why 'Bento'? Think of the Japanese lunchbox - lots of different things, all elegantly presented.

Photo credit roboppy (CC)

There's a lot more to be said about Bento, but I want to reserve my comments until I've had a chance to try the preview version http://www.bentotrial.com.

What's holding me back? I'd expected delivery of my new iMac (to be my Leopard system) by now, but there's been an "unexpected delay" according to the Apple Store and it won't be here until next week. When I first got the news I wondered if it foreshadowed a minor revision (eg a speed bump) to the iMac specs, but a little detective work suggests only orders specifying the 500G drive are affected, scotching that idea. Given the iMac's relatively recent introduction, I suppose it was wishful thinking.