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Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean's niche. Some screenshots. Read about the origins of Bean here. Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It doesn't do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats. |
Version 2.4.2 (released 30 November 2009)
Featuring improved Snow Leopard compatibility and various bug fixes.
Includes: Chinese (Simplified), Danish, English, French, German, Italian, and Slovak user interfaces.
Instructions for localizing Bean
Requirements
A Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.4 Tiger, OS X 10.5 Leopard, or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Installation
Open the disk image and copy Bean.app to your Applications folder. You may need to 'authenticate' this action with an administrator password. Don't forget to eject the disk image. If you have trouble, read this.
FAQ / Troubleshooting
Answers to common questions about Bean are here. For troubleshooting, click here.
Cost / License / Sourcecode
Bean is provided at no monetary cost and is released under the Gnu General Public Licence.
Bean is open source. Click here to download the Objective-C sourcecode.
Bean comes with no warranty; you assume all the risk of using it (see the Gnu GPL for details).
Contact
Report bugs, give feedback, or ask questions here: jnrh2001 (at) yahoo (dot) com.
Why use Bean?
Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered.
• If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean.
• If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count, try Bean.
• If you desire a simple, beautiful writing environment, try Bean.
Features
Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:
• a live word count
• a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
• a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
• an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
• date-stamped backups
• autosaving
• a page layout mode
• an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
• find panel allows regular expressions (pattern matching)
• all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)
Bean doesn't...
...do footnotes, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).
File Formats
Bean natively reads and writes these file formats:
• .rtf format (rich text)
• .rtfd format (rich text with graphics)
• .bean format (identical to .rtfd)
• .txt format (Unicode and legacy)
• .html format (as source code)
• .webarchive format (Apple's web archive format)
Bean transparently imports and exports these formats:
• .doc format (MS Word '97, minus images, margins, and page size)...more info here
• .docx format (Word 2007, minus images and some formatting)...more info here
• .odt format (OpenDocument, minus images, margins, and page size)
• .xml format (MS Word 2003 XML, minus images)
Bean can export all of the above formats to these formats:
• .html (web page format, minus images)
• .doc compatible (with images intact)
• .rtf (with images intact)
Related Links
iText Express is a small, free Cocoa word processor that does footnotes.
OpenOffice Aqua is a large, free MS Word clone featuring a native OS X interface.
AbiWord 2.3.99 (the last usable version for OS X in my opinion) can be downloaded here.
An interview I did about programming Bean can be found here.
Laurent Baumann designed most of the icons for Bean. He recently won an Apple Design Award for his work on Fontcase.
WordService (download link toward bottom of page) will add valuable actions to your Services menu, such as Remove Line Endings, Sort Items, Remove Multiple Spaces, All Caps, Rotate13, etc.
When Bean users request these features, I point them toward WordService. Be sure to read the installation instructions. A discussion of the power of Services.
CopyPaste Pro is a multiple clipboard utility that lets you display, edit and archive clippings. It also offers Services-like functionality. By breaking the one-clipping limit of the Pasteboard, you can work less and accomplish more. (Bean is the built-in editor for CopyPaste.)
Bean 1.3.3 (released 6 August 2008) is an older version of Bean that has user interfaces for some languages not yet in the current version, including Catalan, Japanese, Korean & Swedish.
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Note: text and images from the website bean-osx.com may be used by others (including direct quotation of text and reuse of images) for both wikipedia-style informative articles and for software reviews. JH