 |
DESCRIPTION
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 or change the margins, try Bean.
If you're pining away for Write Now-esque simplicity or just want a low-pressure writing environment, try Bean.
Features:
- 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)
- An option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
- Selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
- A floating windows option (like Stickies has)
- Easy to use menus
- Remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
- All of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)
- Please keep in mind that Bean is betaware
WHAT'S NEW
Version 2.4.2:
Changes (to accomodate OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard)
- Under Snow Leopard, Bean by default now does automatic text substitution (for example, substituting 'the' for 'teh' or changing (c) to ©). Text substitutions are controlled at System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Symbol and Text Substitution. Substitution can be turned off during an editing session by unchecking Substitutions > Text Replacement in the context menu of the document. There is a hidden preference setting which disables text substitutions for all documents: quit Bean and paste this command into a Terminal.app session (change NO to YES to re-enable it):
defaults write com.SevenYearsDreaming.Bean prefTextReplacement -bool NO
- Similarly, under Snow Leopard, typographic dash substitution (off by default) can be enabled by using this command:
defaults write com.SevenYearsDreaming.Bean prefDashSubstitution -bool YES
- Under Snow Leopard, when you double-click a document icon in the Finder, the filename extension determines what application opens the file. This means that an .rtf or .rtfd document created in Bean opens (by default) in Text Edit. Since this is probably not the expected behavior, I've changed the code so that .rtf and .rtfd files saved in Bean now open in Bean (by using the Finder's 'Open With…' override). Files in other formats saved by Bean will still open in the default application associated with that file (usually, Text Edit). To disable this behavior, quit Bean, and paste this command into a Terminal.app session (change NO to YES to re-enable it):
defaults write com.SevenYearsDreaming.Bean prefAssociateDocumentWithBean -bool NO
Note that you can associate all document files of a particular type (that is, having the same filename extension) with a different default application by using the 'Change All...' button in the Finder's 'Get Info…' panel.
Services
- Under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you must enable the individual Services offered by Bean if you wish them to appear in the Services menu and the document's context menu (see System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services). To review, Bean offers the following services: New Bean Document Containing Selection, Paste Selection into Current Bean Document, HTML Snippit from Selection, HTML+CSS Snippit from Selection, Recover Text from Selected File.
- The 'Lorem Ipsum' service, although useful in concept, no longer works correctly under Snow Leopard and has been removed. This is apparently due to a Snow Leopard bug which prevents an app from vending a text-transformation service to its own documents, resulting in a freeze (rdr://7355325).
Bugfixes
- Spotlight now indexes the contents of .bean format files.
- Fixed a bug where the preference 'Suggest filename at first save' did not work under Snow Leopard.
- Fixed a bug where resizing an image would temporarily blur it under Snow Leopard.
- Fixed some leaks revealed by Static Analysis.
- Fixed a problem where the List Marker… panel could appear on the Find/Replace window instead of a document window.
- Tried to fix internationalized help files...it seems like sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, even when the help caches cleaned
- Fixed a permissions glitch that could cause the Italian localization not to work.
- Fixed a problem with alternate colors that could cause erratic behavior in Bean and produce '-redComponent not defined' console error message.
Code/Localization
- Because this is a bugfix release, no changes were made to the user interface in this version that require changes to the included localizations.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
| SCREENSHOT
|
|
 |
|  |
 | |  |
| Bean User Reviews (66 posts) | Write A Review |
 | Feb 2 2010 |
I_VITALE Excellent text editor and word processor, full of little touches well thought out. One for all: the blinking, fat, colored cursor. Having struggled with the invisible Apple cursor for more than 20 years, it was like seeing the light again. And light it is indeed, easy to open and close (just a couple of seconds) whenever it's needed, to write a few notes, or to read something quickly, or to check the number of characters of a text (the first test was with a dairy containing 337K words). A program written by people who use it, and brought up in a Mac environment. Even the Italian translation is properly done. Instantly promoted to primary text reader and word processor, instead of Text Edit. The only thing lacking is, when importing .doc files, the ability to keep small caps. All word processors lose them, bar Word. The day it's implemented, I'll throw away Word for good.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
 | Jan 17 2010 |
HIPPEMAN I like this peace of software a lot except for the fact that it doesn't show any images included in .doc files! Very annoying! Working on OS Snow Leopard and latest updates. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. TIA
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
 | Jan 2 2010 |
RAYJ Ever since I decided not to keep paying exorbitant sums for the upgrades to you-know-who's-Office I've been looking for a word-processor that balanced power, performance and price. I used Mariner's word processor (and their spreadsheet) for a long time, but the company seems to have lost interest in them: upgrades promised years ago have never materialised. I dabbled with most of the other Mac word processors but they all seemed too fiddly or too expensive for what they offered. (And despite VangoCambo's comment below that he sees no point in anything between Word and Text Edit, I see that he himself spent a couple of years using Mellel). I now use NeoOffice for heavy duty stuff - and I'm very pleased with it in most respects - but it is something of a sledgehammer/nut relationship for basic word processing. Bean's developer, James Hoover, says this is a niche product, but it's a very big niche: I guess that 90 percent of folks would find that it satisfied 90 percent of their word processing needs. It works well, it's versatile, it's fast, it uses standard formats, it looks good - what more could you ask for?
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Dec 1 2009 |
VANGOCAMBO What i don't understand is that all u people keep saying the software great. Why is there a need for this software, if u don't like MS Word, then don't use it. It markets for other users who need it. U can use Textedit if you want unclutter wordprocessor, why bother clutter your system with new software.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Dec 1 2009 |
RUDO.BA MSW is overkill. But... try change margins in TextEdit. Or word count. Or fullscreen work. Or open any A4 *.doc document (always as Letter in TextEdit). ...thanks for Bean. I use Bean every day at work and at home too. Great software. Still no bloatware, but fast as TextEdit, but more usable.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| Nov 30 2009 |
REPEATER75 I've been using this app for over a year now and I consider it indispensable because MS Word is so slow and hogs memory. It's not a tool for complex layouts or for editing your PHP code, but for RTF and simple text documents, it's really hard to beat. Adding sparkle update integration would make it PERFECT.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Nov 30 2009 |
DOUG EDDY I like Bean very much. I still use TextEdit Plus though it is way behind in so many things. I prefer it's search and replace interface, though you can do paragraph return and tab search/replaces with it, too. Just more ease in TextEdit Plus. I usually have massive internet articles that need format work, and since Pages will NOT let you search and replace in selected text (why not? Isn't that a basic???) so I depend on TextEdit Plus.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Nov 1 2009 |
XANDRA Not sure if this is a review, comment.In general this is an Excellent program, some small but vital improvements over Apple's Tex-Edit include: - ability to view invisibles while still maintaining ability to copy/paste graphics and text simultaneously As much as I like this app - I'm still desperate for Text-Edit Plus' Find/Replace. Is there anything out there with Tex-Edit Plus's find replace??? Till then I'm still dependant on Word.
(Version 2.4.1) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Dec 1 2009 |
STEVEN GOODHEART (I *love* Bean, but since you and some others have been jonesing for a better kind of search ability, I'm posting this -- no reflection on Bean at all!) A better search? Have you tried out Jedit X? It has a lot of horsepower and some really powerful search functions. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7162/jedit-x I especially love how I can do a search for some word or phrase, and then JEdit X will compile a list of all the "hits" with associated context -- and this compilation of hits can be saved! Even better, the hits are hyper-linked to the document you did the search in, so you can just click on the hyperlink and you are taken right to the word in the document. I can tell you how many hundred of times I've used this feature.
(Version 2.4.2) | |
| Oct 4 2009 |
AARGL Waow! Now that it's localized in French, Bean is not far to substitute for old Tex-Edit Plus! Add the ability to read or import Tex-Edit Plus format (I have, say, 200 Tex-Edit docs and it would be a pain in the arse to open/convert/save to rtf everyone of them... :-(, and I'll switch immediately. Add a default background color for any white backgrounded document, and I worship you! ;-)
(Version 2.4.1) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Oct 3 2009 |
DCANNIS The Italian translation don't work
(Version 2.4.1) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Sep 28 2009 |
DORKYPANTS Another vote for Bean. It can open .webarchive files and let you get at the components within.
(Version 2.4) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
|
| View all 66 posts >> |
|
