MacApper » Ben Miller

Bean: A Free Clean & Simple Word Processor

Ben Miller — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:30:35 +0000

One thing that most Mac users pride themselves on is the incredible amount of quality software to quickly and easily get a task done. Some of the best Mac software out there is single-purpose driven.

It makes the most sense, and it has been Apple’s philosophy for years. All this being said, however, there is something missing when it comes to word processing on the Mac.

The thought of opening Microsoft Office to write a paper just depresses me. It’s slow, bloated, and one of the most “un-Mac-like” apps you can find; and until OpenOffice can be a real Mac app (Cocoa), it’s not worth the trouble most of the time either. Pages is making strong strides, but you have to purchase the iWork suite, which can be a problem for some people as well.

You may remember Bean when we mentioned it briefly while it was in beta. Things have changed dramatically since then and I encourage everyone to give it another look. Bean is a light-weight simple word processor that can take care of almost all of a casual user’s needs. It has everything most users look for, including a live word count, spell checking, word completion, floating windows, auto-saving, and much more.

It even has the ability to import Word documents, though it has a few limitations. The only problem I have had when using Word documents, is the inability for Bean to understand footnotes. This may be a problem for some, but it wasn’t for myself.

This word processor is built on Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework, so it’s actually similar to TextEdit. Some call it TextEdit on steroids. But best of all, it’s free and open-source. We totally recommend it, if you’re on a tight budget (if you need a full fledged office suite, considering investing in iWork ’08 or OpenOffice), or have simple word processing needs. If you’re a code monkey, the Objective-C source code is available for you to tweak and customize, so you can add new features if you wish.

Download Bean and try it today. What word processor do you use/recommend?

Google Calendar Loves You and Your iPhone

Ben Miller — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:30:01 +0000

We just love the close friendship between our dear friends Apple and Google. They keep giving us neat collaboration like the Google Maps iPhone App. Today’s reason to love the love comes to us from a post on Big G's Official Gmail Blog. The Google Calendar team has worked with the Mobile team to create a custom tailored interface for mobile Safari users that makes checking out your Google Calendar dates and events easier than ever from your iPhone or iPod touch. This is certainly becoming a growing trend in the Web 2.0 scene and it's great to see Google jumping on board.

Check out the details here.

Xee: Image Viewing at Its Finest

Ben Miller — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 13:30:52 +0000

We previously reviewed The Unarchiver, a free replacement for the built-in archive manager inside OS X that could handle anything thrown at it in a much cleaner, light-weight manner. The same guys who made that great app put that same philosophy into an image viewer. The result? Xee – a free, lightweight, easy-to-use app that is designed to easily give the user plenty of options in a slim, no frills interface. So is it worthy of replacing Preview as your default image viewer?

Xee can read just about any image format you can think of, including any image format Preview can view and then some; including PCX, Maya IFF and Amiga IFF-ILBM. Xee can also “losslessy” rotate and crop JPEG images. With some other appsincluding Previewwhen an image is rotated and saved it is re-compressed, resulting in a loss of quality. This is a great feature for all of you hardcore photography junkies that don’t want to lose a single detail. For you keyboard wizards, Xee offers a plethora of keyboard shortcuts that make browsing, opening, and manipulating images much faster than just using your mouse.

One small detail of Xee that some people don’t enjoy is the default icon set that comes with the app. To fix this, we turn to Adam Betts for help. Adam has made a great set of replacement icons that make the program much better on the eyes. Click here for more on that.

Xee is a freeware app and can be downloaded from the Xee website.