Rather than compete head to head with the like of Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, Bean is a small word processor with an emphasis on speed and not distracting from the task of writing. While some features have been lost in the interests of performance Bean still has a live count and date stamped backups.

Bean can read a good range of document types: rtf (rich text), rtfd (rich text with graphics), txt, html and webarchive (Apple's web archive format). It can import and export all Word documents from verion 97 and later as well as the xml format used by Word 2003.

As Bean is open source, the code can also be downloaded.

System requirements:

• A Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.4.0 Tiger or later.
• Bean has not been tested with OS X 10.5 Leopard, the upcoming OS X release