Technology and consumer electronics, like so many other things, is a balancing act. Put too little into a product and people complain it's inadequate. But add too much content and the manufacturer is accused of product " bloat." Here are a few examples of software I tested recently that seems to have gotten the balance about right:

Bento from FileMaker. I wish I could give totally rave reviews to Bento, which is the most innovative personal database software I've seen in years. At $49 it is practically a steal. More important, it is remarkably simple to use. It integrates into Mac computers running Apple's new Leopard operating system, letting you make use of the OS's search tools, calendar and address book. Essentially if you know how to use iTunes and iPhoto, you know everything you need to know about setting up a Bento database. It even has relational database capabilities allowing you to link one set of data to another though simple drag-and-drop mouse maneuvers. Plus it includes more than 20 well-designed templates to give your information an attractive look.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a business database. It will not replace FileMaker Pro 9 (Window and Mac) for heavy-duty or even medium-duty data crunching. It is optimized for home use — keeping track of your CD collection, say, or planning a party. What keeps me from giving it perfect marks is that as a Leopard-only product, only a small number of computer users can benefit from it. Plus, on an older iMac with PowerPC processors it froze with some frequency, limiting its use further to Intel Macs. That said, for someone buying a new Mac, Bento is a no-brainer. And it establishes an industry benchmark for simplified personal database design.

Quicken Starter Edition 2008 from Intuit ($29, Windows only). There is not a whole lot new in the regular Quicken lineup, but Intuit did add a new bottom-of-the-line version that caught my attention because this "new" edition actually is what Quicken originally used to be: a simple electronic "checkbook." No elaborate reporting, charting, and analysis tools — just the metaphor of a checkbook used to electronically track bank and brokerage accounts. Intuit intended this as a way to entice new users — existing users cannot import their account data into Starter — but the company provided a reminder that simplicity can be sweet.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 (Windows and Mac) and Premiere Elements 4.0 (Windows). Long my favorite example of how less can be more, these latest versions establish themselves firmly as the preferred choice for consumers rather than the professional versions of the software. The fact is that unless you are a graphics pro, with time to fine-tune every single pixel of your image files, you will do better with these editions. They are easier to use, and they have automated tools that the pro versions lack.

For example, Photoshop Elements will create collages out of a group of photos, automatically doing in a few seconds the layering, rotating, cutting, pasting, and ordering that would take forever to do manually in Photoshop CS3. The new versions of Elements also have a new colorful and distinctive look, with the various tool collections now more organized and the icons more clearly illustrate their purpose. Also welcome is the return of a new Mac version of Photoshop Elements (Adobe skipped 5.0 for Mac), which is now a " universal binary" that will work natively on PowerPC or Intel Macs.

Microsoft Office 2008 (Mac). The Mac version of Office accomplishes what its Windows counterpart, Office 2007, failed to do: deliver new features without forcing customers to relearn the program.

Admittedly, Microsoft's Mac team had an edge in that it already had an elaborate, context-aware formatting options box (the "formatting palette") in prior versions that performed the same function as the controversial and confusing "ribbon" in Office 2007. Office 2008 instead sticks with the familiar palette and adds a new feature, called the "elements gallery" to its toolbar that lets you add such things as cover pages in Word or new slide layouts and transitions in PowerPoint.

The biggest changes in OfficeMac are its adoption of the new XML-based file formats of the Windows version and its transition to universal binary. Much of the other changes affect esthetics. The interface now is more Mac-like. More important, the graphics and templates have received a long-overdue overhaul to make the documents you produce more tasteful and businesslike.

PowerPoint gets the biggest makeover, with a hefty increase in the number of slide layouts, plus graphics placement guides (first seen in Apple's Keynote), and all-new design themes. Word gets equivalent changes, plus a "publishing layout" mode for newsletters, flyers, and other desktop publishing (to keep pace with Apple's Pages). Changes in Excel are more modest, and the Entourage email-personal information manager application is disappointingly unchanged except for its looks.

All in all, though, Microsoft made just enough changes to maintain its leadership in Mac productivity software.

Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.