Another pair of professional/everyman programs emerged with the introduction of Bento. Named after the elegant boxes used to package a Japanese lunch, the $49 application targets users who want to corral the myriad digital elements of their personal lives — addresses and phone numbers, photos, appointments and to-do lists — into a program that knows which items are connected and which aren’t. It’s a tidy and customizable solution described as a “personal database,” which makes clear the distinction between Bento and its corporate big bro, the erstwhile Filemaker Pro 9. The $299 Filemaker Pro is complex and robust, allowing enough ways to manipulate and interconnect information that businesses have relied on it for many years. It’s not intended to be your personal address book, but that doesn’t stop geeks like me — who love being able to design an interface and choose exactly how info gets sorted — from using it as one.

More specialized pieces of software debuted this week as well, like Dictate, a package from $199 up (including headset) that will transcribe your speech into on-screen text with a reported accuracy of 99%.

Naturally, all the new applications boasted fine-tuning to make them work smoothly with Leopard ($129), the new version of Apple’s operating system that was released shortly before the Expo.

The software behemoth this year came from Apple’s ostensible competitor Microsoft, which despite the ongoing rivalry continues to produce new Macintosh versions of its ubiquitous Office software. Office for Macintosh 2008, a $399.95 package that includes MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and some other cubicle must-haves, sandblasts stodgy old designs with new, more streamlined interfaces. Users love to gripe about Office’s bloat — the way its features sometimes actually get in the way of simple jobs — but after two and a half decades, it remains the standard for those who create office documents to share with others.

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