Bean

Submitted by Mr Potato Head on Thursday, April 18, 2013.

Last modified

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Description of App

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

Version

3.2.5

Free or Paid

Free

Version Of macOS App Was Tested On

10.8.3

Accessibility Comments

Before commenting on the accessibility of this application, I should stress that I am both new to VoiceOver on the Mac and have very low requirements for a word processor.

So far, this application is proving to be extremely accessible. I've only used it to write a few basic letters, but the experience was very satisfying. The only negative is that active development of this application appears to have been discontinued. But, for now, it has saved me the $20 that I was planning to spend on Pages!