About Bean

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.

Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It does not do footnotes and is only partially compatible with the various Word formats (more here).

You can read an essay about the origins of Bean here.

Screenshot

(Click image for larger version)

Download Bean 1.2.0

Current Bean Version: 1.2.0 (released 29 April 2008)

Minor fixes and enhancements. View the changes here.

Bean, Multilingual Edition

(The page linked above lists supported languages and offers a download link.)

Current Bean Multilingual Edition Version: 0.9.11 (released 6 January 2008)

Version 0.9.11 of Bean Multilingual Edition adds support for Danish, German, and Turkish.

Change Log

Road Map

Download Previous Versions

Installation

Open the disk image and drag Bean.app into your Applications folder (or onto the Applications shortcut) to install it. Don't forget to eject the disk image. You may need to 'authenticate' this action with an administrator password. Note that you can install Bean to a USB thumb-drive as well!

To upgrade, drag the new version of Bean into the folder containing the old version, then confirm at the prompt that you want to replace it.

Contact

Report bugs, give feedback, or ask questions here: jnrh2001 (at) yahoo (dot) com.

FAQ

Answers to common questions about Bean are here.

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 or change the margins, 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)
• 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.)

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)
• .pdf
• .doc compatible (with images intact)
• .rtf (with images intact)

Bean doesn't...

...do footnotes, columns, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).

Requirements

A Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.4+ Tiger or OS X 10.5+ Leopard

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).

Please note...

Bean is stable, but nevertheless, use it at your own risk.