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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.
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I'm going to make a note of Bean, though, because there's always the chance I'll make the big jump to Apple the next time I buy a computer. (Though I love my Toshibas.)
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The lack of easy, clean HTML converter tools absolutely boggles me in this HTML-using age. My husband thinks the problem is that I'm still thinking in terms of 1995 and no one nowadays bothers with hand-coding HTML. Yet there are so many situations when it comes in handy ... like posting fic without filling up the character buffer!
I would expect that Windows, as a much bigger platform, should have even more options than the Mac, though. Surely someone out there has written something simple and lightweight and free. (Once upon a time I remember hearing good things about AbiWord -- have you tried it?)
I love my mac; at the same time, I'm not particularly evangelical about it and will fully admit that most of the reason why I like it is because I've used them since the mid-90s and they're what I'm comfortable with. Usually, if I can find one good freeware program for the Mac that does what I want it to do, there are probably 5 similar ones out there for the PC.
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But we do! When we're trying to clean up a file so it isn't a memory hog. (.odt file of my latest story ~250 KB, when I saved it as a .doc ~1400 KB. Ridiculous.) HTML can be just as bad.
Windows does have lots of platforms, but most of them are top heavy with things you never use.
I actually tried AbiWord. It's meh. When it comes to HTML editors I use and love Kompozer. It's nearly perfect. I can upload to my site using it too. It's only failing is no word count function (that I've ever been able to find) and the fact that no one wants to beta an html document. Actually, I'm probably several iterations behind, I'm loathe to download a new version in case they've 'improved' it into unusability. I suppose I would for a word counter though. I used to get around that with a greasemonkey widget, but Firefox no longer supports it.
I'm officially old and grumpy. All these newfangled programs that can't do what the old ones did simply. Oh, for the day of a horse and buggy.
Uhm. So. I'm just starting to sketch in my BB. How's your's looking?
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MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY. I think Orion (the husband) probably has a point that the current zeitgeist is oriented towards having an extra layer between the user and the HTML, and not really needing to know what's going on under the hood, so to speak. Even though the Internet is embedded in the fabric of modern life, it's not so necessary to know the nuts and bolts to use it as it was when we learned how. Sort of like, back in 1930, you had to know how a car worked in order to get the damn thing to run at all, whereas now that they're completely ubiquitous, most people just push the button to make it go and take it to a mechanic if it won't.
But having said that ... yes! Being able to hand-code HTML in comments, clean it up in documents, figure out where it's gone wrong when it fails to work ... I see so many people on LJ struggling with simple HTML failures in the rich-text editor (text the wrong color, pictures won't embed) that is no problem at all with a little HTML tag. I mean, it's great that people don't HAVE to learn it in order to use it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that (I don't change my own oil, even though I know how), but the fact that the whole system is set up so that something as simple as generating a clean, streamlined HTML document is next to impossible ... that's just ridiculous.
Thank you for the link to Kompozer, though! It looks like they have a Mac version, and one thing I would absolutely LOVE to find is a good HTML editor. I am still writing the code for my website in a text editor, but I'm getting very tired of that.
I'm just starting to sketch in my BB. How's yours looking?
*looks shifty* Big Bang? What Big Bang? *facepalm*
... actually, the answer depends on which story I write. I have several barely-begun WiPs sitting around (mostly AUs of various types), any of which would probably make a perfectly serviceable BB since they're so short compared to what we used to have to do in SGA (I am fairly confident that I can crank out 10,000 words with my eyes shut ... now whether they'll be decent words is a different matter, I guess). So I really just have to pick one, or decide if I'm doing a basic casefic instead. And then, um, write it.
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make a perfectly serviceable BB since they're so short compared to what we used to have to do in SGA (I am fairly confident that I can crank out 10,000 words with my eyes shut
Yeah, I'm not too worried over making 10,000 words, but that it will never be enough to tell the story.