A new desktop application for the Mac aims to turn the boring old database – the sullen domain of accountants, librarians and pencil-pushing bureaucrats – into an empowering organizational tool that appeals to everyone.

Well, maybe not everyone.

Every household has a "planner," and Filemaker's Bento ($50, Mac OS X 10.5 only, free preview available until January) is tailor-made for this personality type – the hyperorganized dad who can't enjoy a vacation until all the reservations are documented in triplicate, or the wife who can't throw a party without labeled invitations and a spreadsheet tracking who's RSVP'd and who hasn't.

Not all of us are borderline-OCD sufferers, so here's an analogy to help you grasp the appeal of a pretty-looking desktop database application: What iTunes does for your digital music, Bento can do for contacts, spreadsheets and digital photos. It provides a colorful easy-to-use animated interface for storing and organizing personal data, and in doing so, it stands out among the dozens of ugly tables-and-text options.

Bento can build an organization system for just about anything. Photos, PDF documents, MP3s, videos, Keynote presentations and charts from Pages can all be added to Bento. You can also drop in spreadsheets from Excel or import any spreadsheet or CSV file.

For my testing, I used Bento to create a database of recently tasted wines. I added fields for vineyard, grape varietal, vintage, age of the bottle, my rating and a text field for tasting notes. I also put in a slot to display the label. Of course, if I have contact information for the vineyard, the restaurant where I drank it or the friend who recommended it, I can add that easily by dragging from my Address Book app. I can now sort my vinous memories by rating, type of grape, vintage or any way I like.

Filemaker is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple, and Bento has a very Apple-flavored look and feel. It has much of the same search functionality as iTunes, and the themes of the database forms have the same style as the backgrounds in iLife applications like iWeb and iDVD. The visual flair of the templates make printouts look snappy as well.

Note: Bento requires Leopard. It utilizes Leopard-specific enhancements like Advanced Find, an application-specific implementation of Spotlight desktop search, and the new Core Animation engine.

Bento organizes all of your personal collateral into "collections" you can customize. Bento collections are a lot like iTunes playlists. For example, all of my Address Book contacts are available in Bento as a collection by default, but I can build separate collections of friends, family members, co-workers, PR flacks and sources for stories. Using Bento's form builder, I can extend my basic Address Book entries by rating everyone based on how much I like them. I just drag an iTunes-style star-rating widget onto their contact cards. I can also add a check box and fill it in only if that person has ever bought me a birthday present.

Collections can be sorted manually, or you can build "smart" collections, just like you'd build a smart playlist in iTunes.

For example, I can generate a smart collection showing only the people in my Address Book who are not PR flacks, who did buy me birthday presents, and whom I judge to be at least a 4 out of 5. Voilà – I now have the guest list for my next party.

Bento syncs with the databases already on your Mac: your Address Book, iCal calendar and a .Mac account if you have one. So change an address in Bento, and you'll see the change show up in Address Book and vice versa. Also, when you put new contacts onto your Mac by entering them manually or syncing your iPhone, those contacts become instantly accessible in Bento.

Bento has some drawbacks. The star-based rating system is limited, and some of the fields require too much data – my date-based "vintage" field for wines wouldn't accept anything less than a specific day, month and year. But the application is well-enough-designed – and offers enough ways to tweak, organize and examine – to make even the control freaks blush with delight.

Bento is available as a free "preview" download until January 2008, at which point the preview will stop working. Single-user version costs $50, and a five-user family pack costs $100. Bento also requires Leopard (Mac OS X version 10.5 or later).