About Bean...

What is Bean?

Bean is a small, efficient rich text editor for OS X. It features: a live word count, a zoom slider, date-stamped backups, a page layout mode, an alternate colors editing mode, and a full screen mode. It has an easy-to-use Inspector panel to adjust text formatting. You can select text by style, then paste another copied style onto the selection.

Bean runs under both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) on both PowerPC and Intel Macs, and on 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on Intel Macs. It is based around Apple’s Cocoa text engine (NSTextView etc.) and was NSDocument-based before Text Edit was.

Bean Doesn’t Do…

...footnotes, sections, or split-view windows. Also, there is no ‘graphics layer,’ just in-line graphics.

Bean is Free and Open Source

Bean is provided free of charge; use it and share it if you wish. Also, Bean is released under the Gnu GPL license; this means the source code is available and can be used or improved by you. Keep in mind that, according to the Gnu GPL license, if you use Bean’s source code extensively for anything but a private project, your code must be open source as well.

If you have suggestions for improvements or find bugs, email me at the address below.

Feedback: jnrh2001@yahoo.com

When reporting bugs, please let me know what version of Bean you are using as well as what version of OS X. Include: what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. If the bug is repeatable, it is important that you include the exact steps to reproduce the bug. Example document files and screenshots can be helpful. If Bean crashes due to a bug, please copy the relevent error message from the log in Console.app and send it to me. Thanks!

Note Carefully:

Don’t use Bean for anything ‘mission critical.’ Writing a graduate thesis? Use something else. My advice is, if you're writing anything important or time-consuming, use the autosave and backup functions. Also, for Pete's sake, backup your harddrive (using Time Machine, for example). It's not a question of if your harddrive will fail, it's a question of when it will fail (at least until persistent memory becomes flash-based).