Finally Converted from Bento!

[grooveagent]

Hi Brendan,

I just tried the demo and have finally ditched Bento and bought all three apps. I love how you have evolved the program, but was wondering if I could make some suggestions to streamline the workflow?

1) Autosync to the cloud on start/exit. Right now there seems to be a two-click process to sync to the cloud. If it can’t be done automatically, maybe a single button process or keyboard shortcut?

2) Encrypt only forms that require privacy, instead of the whole database. This way you don’t have to to enter a password each time you want to access non-private information.

3) Move the “Find Forms” field to the top, and have it search as you type while hiding forms that don’t fit your criteria. This would make it easier to find and a more logical location.

Thanks Brendan, keep up the excellent work!

[Brendan]

Awesome and welcome aboard!

1. It’s actually only a one click process since there’s an upload to iCloud button at the bottom right of the main window on the Mac version. And on the iOS version you can initiate an upload using the “pull-to-refresh” action on the main Forms list.

2. You can protect a single form if you enable the “Encrypt Field Value” option for any field that supports that option. Please note however that if you do this right now, on the Mac version the inspector panels won’t display on the right for forms with encrypted fields. A bug. I’m sorry. It’s fixed already for the next update.

3. I put the Find Forms function on the bottom because Apple’s Xcode developer tools has their find function down there and it just seemed natural to me. You can type command-shift-f to quickly put the focus on that field if you like. Also, I originally thought about filtering as you typed, but then it caused some performance and other issues because as you typed, it would filter the forms, select the closest one that matched, displayed the results on the right and then did it all over again if you hadn’t finished typing. So now I just find the form when you press the Return key and clear the search field so it’s ready to accept a new search as soon as it has found a match.

Thanks!

Brendan

[grooveagent]

Thanks for your reply Brendan.

1) I didn’t see the sync button on the bottom of the app. Maybe in future versions the sync button could be optionally moved to the top toolbar? Even better, have it prompt for a sync upon exit of the program?

2) Being able to encrypt certain certain forms in an awesome feature. Thank you! To enhance this it would be great if when you selected an encrypted form, the keyboard focus would automatically land in the password field to quickly unlock the form.

3) The command-shift-f is an awesome work around. Thanks for that. I totally understand what you’re saying about the real-time filtering – it can really slow things down, especially on IOS. When searching I noticed that if for example you have two forms named “car mileage” and “car maintenance” in different categories, and do a search for “car”, only the first form is highlighted. It would be nice if all forms were highlighted.

These are of course minor things and I think you’re doing an awesome job with Tap Forms. I’m excited that it is under active development (unlike Bento R.I.P.) and in my opinion has surpassed Bento in some ways while including features that I always wished Bento had. I’m looking forward to the next update.

Thanks again Brendan!

[Brendan]

3) I can’t really select more than one form at a time because only one form’s records can be displayed at a time, so it didn’t make sense to allow multiple results to be found. That’s why I pick the first. Although I suppose if you wanted to delete multiple forms at a time it would make sense to allow multi-select there. But I prefer to allow you to delete only one form at a time so that you know you’re really wanting to do that.

[Author]

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