about Bean...

Why Bean?

Various word processors have come and gone over the years. I started to collect old word processors and became interested in how these programs can either help you or work against you.


One that people still rave about is WriteNow. Mainly they like the fact that it's lean and fast, and that the font and style menus are easy to get at. That old-style menu system doesn't work well when you have a gajillian fonts, however.


I remember working with Word Perfect for DOS, the industry standard at one time. It was nightmarish. People would accidentally stack dozens of invisible codes together which would fight each other for control of the text. You had to 'reveal' them, then root them out like a dentist.


Microsoft Word took the best from Word Perfect and ditched the rest. For instance, they borrowed the 'white text on blue background' mode, which is brilliant. It's easy on the eyes, and you aren't faced with a serious-looking 'blank sheet' when you start to write.


Geoworks, a PC operating system that was object-oriented like Apple's Cocoa, included a fantastic word processor/desktop publishing program that to this day is easier to use and more powerful than anything else out there. Geoworks got muscled out by Microsoft and disappeared.


Frankly, the OS/2 and Geoworks era was the time when the government should have sued Microsoft, not ten years later. IBM spent a billion dollars on OS/2, yet Microsoft strong-armed them into pushing Windows instead. By the time anyone became interested in this, all the competition had been crushed years before. Including word processor competition.


So now, people are stuck with Microsoft Word, which is very nice, but can be quite annoying. ("It looks like you're writing a letter, Dave. Would you like me to throw you out the airlock without your space helmet on? I mean...would you like me to format it for you?")


Text Edit is a great showpiece for Apple's NSText object, but it goes no farther than that (by design). So what I've done with Bean is to make a little word processor that has a live word count and a zoom slider right at the bottom of the window. It does date-stamped backups and has an autosave feature. It has a nice-looking 'Page Layout' mode and the 'white on blue' (or any other combination) alternate color mode for editing. You can set the page margins, which you can't in Text Edit. None of the menus are hidden too deep. It has an easy-to-use Inspector with lots of sliders to adjust the formatting of the text. While Bean doesn't save or catalog text styles, you can copy a style, select all text matching another style, then paste the first style in to make it all match. The inspector has a popup menu that gives you immediate access to all font family variations (check out Helvetica Neue, if you have that font).


What Bean Doesn't Do:

First, no footnotes. Bummer, I know. If you want a free program that does footnotes well, try iText Express. (Don't be scared by the website.) If you need an editor with a full-screen mode, try Scrivener. It's fab. Headers and footers created by Bean are the Cocoa default ones, such as Text Edit prints, and can't be modified (but you can turn them on and off in Preferences). Bean can't do columns, or sections. Bean can't do a split view (two windows with different views of the same document). Bean doesn't have a 'Styles Drawer' or anything like that. Also, there is no 'graphics' layer above or below the text (although Bean handles in-line graphics).

All these things are possible and may be included in a future Bean2 format, but...don't hold your breath.


Bean is Free and Open Source

I wrote Bean for fun, not money. So it is provided free of charge. Bean is released under the Gnu GPL license; the source code is available and can be used or improved by you. If you have suggestions, find bugs, or improve the code, let me know at the email address below.


Feedback: jnrh2001@yahoo.com


Note Carefully

Obviously, any problems with Bean extend from the programmer, me. But as I'm not actually a programmer, per se, I'm warning you to not use Bean for anything mission critical. Writing a graduate thesis? Use something else.

If you're writing anything important or time-consuming, use the backup and autosave functions. Also, for Pete's sake, backup your harddrive. It's not a question of if it will fail, it's a question of when it will fail (this will hold true until persistent memory becomes flash-based).