A free alternative to MS Word

There’s already a plethora of word processors on Mac, and most of them fit the job perfectly. Bean is an open source text editor with a very nice interface and its personal set of features. We liked the inspector tool, which gives you quick access to elements like alignment, spacing, or indenting. Bean also carries a dictionary and makes it really simple to check the spelling and definition of a word.

Bean’s font manager, which lets you add new ones or arrange your favorite ones, is very well thought out. Bean also has a statistics window, which you call up directly from the menu bar, and that will give you word count, number of paragraphs and more. Bean is a very pleasant word processor to use and you always feel like tools are immediately accessible. It’s a good free and simple alternative to Microsoft Word or Open Office.

Bugfixes: Fixed a bug that prevented attachments with non-ASCII characters in their filenames to save correctly in .rtfd and .bean format files (20130104-1). Altered rtf image decoding code to accommodate image hex data preceded by a newline (20130103-1). Fixed a bug where, when opening .rtf files, a paragraph starting with an image could lose its paragraph attributes. For example, if a cell in a text table contained only an image, the image would be removed from the table since text tables are really paragraph attributes. (20130105-1).

Changes

• Bugfixes: Fixed a bug that prevented attachments with non-ASCII characters in their filenames to save correctly in .rtfd and .bean format files (20130104-1). Altered rtf image decoding code to accommodate image hex data preceded by a newline (20130103-1). Fixed a bug where, when opening .rtf files, a paragraph starting with an image could lose its paragraph attributes. For example, if a cell in a text table contained only an image, the image would be removed from the table since text tables are really paragraph attributes. (20130105-1).