03/12/2009
Tired of Word taking for ever to start up just to copy a couple paragraphs of text out of a .doc file someone emailed you? Are most of your word processing chores a matter of writing a few pages or less without lots of fancy formatting? If so, you might want to look at Bean. Bean is a new, and free, word processor for Mac OS X users. It's actually a rich-text editor, but that means a lot of functionality for most daily word processing work. It provides more features than TextEdit, but doesn't burden you with more interface or features than you need. It reminds me a bit of WriteNow. (If that reference is too obscure, my appologies. If you're that old, you'll be excited by Bean's approach.) Bean can open Word .doc and .docx files. It may not support all formatting, but it does a good job. It can save in several formats including .rft, .doc .html, .txt, and interestingly, .webarchive, which is Safari's web archive format. So, give Bean a try. I think you'll be happy you did. Bean has earned it's place on my dock. < http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html >
02/05/2009