One application that’s definitely missing from the plethora available for Mac OS X is a small, compact bug tracking tool for small software developers. I’ve used a variety of systems over the years but haven’t ever really been happy with them for personal use. I don’t want a web interface, multi-user options or integration with source control. All I want is a nice, clean database that allows me to keep track of the various problems and feature requests that users have reported. No mess, no fuss.

Because of this, I’ve been tinkering around with Bento over the past few weeks. And, with a little bit of adaptation, it looks like it might be ideal for small-scale bug tracking.

Here’s a list of active bugs and feature requests for RapidAlbum:

And here’s a detailed entry:

The theme that I’m using here is non-standard. The current selection of Bento themes is pretty horrible - it’s geared towards the sort of folks who think that Comic Sans is “cute”. However, if you open the Bento application package, it’s pretty straightforward (if you’re comfortable with a plist editor) to add a new theme that uses muted colors and a reasonable font. This limits the amount of eye bleeding that the current selection of Bento themes induces (what were they thinking?).

Bento also appears to be scriptable altho’ I haven’t started tinkering with that yet (an Automator action for parsing email messages and creating a new bug record would be ideal).

All told, it took under an hour of tweaking and configuring to get Bento set up for my bug tracking needs (and most of that was theme tweaking). That’s not bad at all.