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Bean!
Okay, I have to gush a bit about my new word processor acquisition. :D My current rapture of delight will make a whole lot more sense if I give a little background here.
I have always owned Macs, and for a decade, I did all my writing in AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks). I loved AppleWorks. It was quick-loading, simple and fast; it had few bells and whistles; it didn't take up a lot of space or slow down my machine; and it had a feature that no other program under the sun seems to have -- clean HTML export (i.e. minimal tags: *p* and *b* and *i*, and that's about it), which I used a lot when I was writing long journal posts or formatting fiction to put on the web. Since I always wrote in it, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks was my entire writing environment -- it was desktop and notebook, favorite pen and favorite coffeeshop. It was where I went to write.
And then Apple stopped supporting it. In 2004.
I went ahead and limped along, even though it got crashier with each new release of the Mac OS, to the point where I had to re-install it about once a month. The news that new versions of the Mac OS would no longer support PPC programs at all, though, meant that the writing was on the wall. Any new computer I bought from here on out would no longer be able to run the program. Realizing that I was going to be faced with the horrifying scenario that everything I'd written would become inaccessible to me (since it was all saved in AppleWorks's proprietary format), I started a quest for a new word processor.
For the last couple of years, I've written mostly using a combination of a plain-text editor (BBedit or TextEdit) and OpenOffice, trying to wean myself off AppleWorks completely. I like plain text -- the fact that it's completely portable between all systems is a huge advantage; no losing access to my files 2 or 5 or 10 years from now -- but I'm frustrated by the lack of italics or other formatting. Also, my two main plain-text editors each have a significant drawback: BBedit has no spell check, and TextEdit has no word count feature. For a while I tried to make OpenOffice my main word processor (both my current working novels were written in it), but I hated it -- the program was dreadfully slow, its HTML export was as useless as Word's, and its ability to save as RTF was also buggy as hell (which was a problem because most of the places where I've been submitting fiction ask for RTF submissions), not to mention that some of its behavior was different than any other word processor I've used (like not being able to jump to the end of a block of selected text with the down arrow). I found myself struggling to work around OpenOffice rather than enjoying the process of writing in it.
A couple of days ago I downloaded Bean, and I am in LOVE. I think I have found my new word processor.
It's super-fast. It's clean. It's simple. It looks a lot like AppleWorks -- actually, the menu structure is so similar that Bean is obviously designed at least partly to cater to the needs of sad AppleWorks expatriots. It doesn't have its own proprietary format; instead it uses RTF as a native format, which means total file portability. And best of all -- CLEAN HTML EXPORT. When I discovered that, I was utterly smitten.
I spend hours every day writing, and I want my word processor to vanish into the background. I want to forget that I'm on a computer and just see the words. Every time the cursor lags behind my typing, every time the program does something unexpected, I'm jerked out of my happy writing reverie. So far, Bean has been working beautifully and it does just what I want it to do: it puts the words on the page without becoming a distracting burden itself.
I know better than to think that it will be around forever. Orion thinks I'm being an idiot to rely on RTF (Microsoft! Ack!), but at least it's ubiquitous enough that most programs seem to be able to import it and there will probably be converters around for the foreseeable future. Ten years from now, I may be doing everything in Google Docs or whatever the newest thing is. But for now, I think I have found my AppleWorks replacement.
I have always owned Macs, and for a decade, I did all my writing in AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks). I loved AppleWorks. It was quick-loading, simple and fast; it had few bells and whistles; it didn't take up a lot of space or slow down my machine; and it had a feature that no other program under the sun seems to have -- clean HTML export (i.e. minimal tags: *p* and *b* and *i*, and that's about it), which I used a lot when I was writing long journal posts or formatting fiction to put on the web. Since I always wrote in it, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks was my entire writing environment -- it was desktop and notebook, favorite pen and favorite coffeeshop. It was where I went to write.
And then Apple stopped supporting it. In 2004.
I went ahead and limped along, even though it got crashier with each new release of the Mac OS, to the point where I had to re-install it about once a month. The news that new versions of the Mac OS would no longer support PPC programs at all, though, meant that the writing was on the wall. Any new computer I bought from here on out would no longer be able to run the program. Realizing that I was going to be faced with the horrifying scenario that everything I'd written would become inaccessible to me (since it was all saved in AppleWorks's proprietary format), I started a quest for a new word processor.
For the last couple of years, I've written mostly using a combination of a plain-text editor (BBedit or TextEdit) and OpenOffice, trying to wean myself off AppleWorks completely. I like plain text -- the fact that it's completely portable between all systems is a huge advantage; no losing access to my files 2 or 5 or 10 years from now -- but I'm frustrated by the lack of italics or other formatting. Also, my two main plain-text editors each have a significant drawback: BBedit has no spell check, and TextEdit has no word count feature. For a while I tried to make OpenOffice my main word processor (both my current working novels were written in it), but I hated it -- the program was dreadfully slow, its HTML export was as useless as Word's, and its ability to save as RTF was also buggy as hell (which was a problem because most of the places where I've been submitting fiction ask for RTF submissions), not to mention that some of its behavior was different than any other word processor I've used (like not being able to jump to the end of a block of selected text with the down arrow). I found myself struggling to work around OpenOffice rather than enjoying the process of writing in it.
A couple of days ago I downloaded Bean, and I am in LOVE. I think I have found my new word processor.
It's super-fast. It's clean. It's simple. It looks a lot like AppleWorks -- actually, the menu structure is so similar that Bean is obviously designed at least partly to cater to the needs of sad AppleWorks expatriots. It doesn't have its own proprietary format; instead it uses RTF as a native format, which means total file portability. And best of all -- CLEAN HTML EXPORT. When I discovered that, I was utterly smitten.
I spend hours every day writing, and I want my word processor to vanish into the background. I want to forget that I'm on a computer and just see the words. Every time the cursor lags behind my typing, every time the program does something unexpected, I'm jerked out of my happy writing reverie. So far, Bean has been working beautifully and it does just what I want it to do: it puts the words on the page without becoming a distracting burden itself.
I know better than to think that it will be around forever. Orion thinks I'm being an idiot to rely on RTF (Microsoft! Ack!), but at least it's ubiquitous enough that most programs seem to be able to import it and there will probably be converters around for the foreseeable future. Ten years from now, I may be doing everything in Google Docs or whatever the newest thing is. But for now, I think I have found my AppleWorks replacement.