What is Digg?107 Comments
- SocialPoison, on 11/14/2007, -5/+74Try bean
- Scyth3, on 10/11/2007, -9/+43If I hear "try bean" one more time...
- Bartboy919, on 10/11/2007, -9/+41Open Office is great, but X11 is lame. NeoOffice is where its at.
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php - allancorbett, on 10/11/2007, -1/+23I quite like using Pages for most things but every once in a while I crack out Office and painstakingly use it... Admittedly I only really use Word and Powerpoint so iWork is fine for me.
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -6/+27I can't speak for Bean but I know I am not the only one that gets annoyed when Word tries to take over my document (e.g. "Are you creating a list?").
- chrisgeleven, on 10/11/2007, -0/+20Only Word 97 support? No support for newer Word formats or even the OpenOffice formats?
Something to watch, but it doesn't seem functional enough to use as an everyday word processor, especially if you receive files in lots of formats. - skaface69, on 10/11/2007, -13/+31"If you desire a simple, low-pressure writing environment, try Bean."
Because using ms word or open office is very stressful - zeejay, on 10/11/2007, -1/+18Maybe, but for those of us who are actually *doing the writing*, and usually start with a blank page, a light and fast word processor is a godsend, especially with the slow, buggy, and horribly designed piece of ***** that is MS Word on the Mac.
Also, for those of us whose work practically always ends up in InDesign or HTML (and there's a lot of us), 95% of Word's features are pointless bloat. Word count, spell check, basic formatting, and save to RTF, and my needs are covered.
Obviously, this product isn't for everyone. But there's a place for it. - Rethcir, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15I'd rather have Ender.
- dvflameartist, on 10/11/2007, -3/+15I'd say its time for an upgrade :-)
- canon66, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11"On a G5 iMac, NeoOffice takes at least 3 minutes to open"
There's something seriously wrong with your system, on my mother's G4 mini it takes about 35-40 seconds. On my MacBook it's about 15 seconds from launch to a blank document. Yeah, 15 seconds is damn long to wait but it's free and once it's open it's reasonably quick, and how many times a day do you quit and relaunch it? If you really want something to complain about, it's the keyboard maneuvering, the normal functions of the command and option with the arrow keys don't work as they do in most Mac applications which is jarring when you're moving back and forth between apps.
Someone else said it but I'll repeat, Abiword is also nice if you just need a quick word processor.
And back on topic, Bean looks rather nifty, I'll have to give it a shot. - Rubuntu, on 10/28/2007, -5/+15The audacity of them to use Open Source and the community and then release a product which does not support a file format advocated by the community "Opendocument Format"
- mozzep, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10The programmers of Bean can get away with 10.4 only because, quite frankly, it's not a very important program. Not only are there many other applications that purport to do the same thing, but those are more prominent as well. If this program was both the only one that did this and was prominent, then it wouldn't be acceptable.
- weneedsound, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10I've tried bean, office and NeoOffice. For word processing I now use Pages. Once you get used to the text-style system.. it becomes a really slick way to author documents. I wish a 3rd party company would come out with a 1001 Pages template cd though.
- hungarianhc, on 10/11/2007, -2/+12This is the first comment I agree 100% with! I'd love to support this project, but why doesn't the OPEN SOURCE project support the OPEN FILE FORMAT? I'd prefer to not have a bunch of files saved as *.bean...
- zackz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10Jokes aside, I think this is a nice product, light weight and fast. Dugg
- kethraal, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9"Can someone tell me what technical features in 10.4 this program uses that are not avaliable in the previous versions?"
Looking at the screenshots, the first thing I notice is that it seems to use the unified layout -- which is 10.4 only.
My other guess is that it probably also uses spinners, and other widgets that are 10.4 only. 10.4 added a lot of small, useful widgets to the UI toolbox -- it's quite possible that those are the only things that are dependent on Tiger. I know that Lostify used to be 10.4 only until a single progress wheel was changed -- so just because it's Tiger-only doesn't mean that it couldn't be made compatible with Panther.
That said, writing software that requires a three-year-old OS isn't exactly the worst thing a dev can do..... - dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8"Open Office is great, but X11 is lame. NeoOffice is where its at."
On a G5 iMac, NeoOffice takes at least 3 minutes to open (I've not timed it, but it takes far far to long to start, considering what it's for - Even opening a 20MB Final Cut project file is faster than NeoOffice displaying a blank document..) - Considering most people don't use 90% of the stuff in NeoOffice (Stuff like the Macros, advanced layout stuff etc etc), Bean does pretty much everything I'd ever need it too, and loads within a second. - GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7The earlier word formats aren't necessarily important though. What it needs is to focus on ODF and OXML. Not that right now these are the important standards but by the time Bean gets to a useful stage these will be the prevalent standards. Other than that the OSS community needs to look at generic tools (meaning a library) that can convert all the binary junk MSO standards into OXML or ODF. Then it would be rather simple to support inporting of old documents.
- djSyndrome, on 10/11/2007, -6/+13"I'd say its time for an upgrade :-)"
Or, they could wait a few months for 10.5 and get that upgrade instead. Not everyone jumps through Steve's $129 hoop every time it's thrown their way. - Baconn, on 10/11/2007, -12/+1810.4 only.
- dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Does anyone know of a similar "lightweight" application, but for creating spreadsheets?
I don't like web applications for such tasks, and I don't want to download the ~100MB OpenOffice just for the Calc application - a "Bean-sized" OO-Calc/MS-Excel-like application would be great.
I can't understand why a spreadsheet application should be large - Since it's basically a grid (few kb of code), the abilty to use formula like =sum(a1:a5) (A few more kb of code), display graphs of the values (a few more kb, and possible some small graphic files, another 10kb or so), and some UI elements (buttons and such, no more than 200kb should be necessary with vector images and such)
That comes to.. ~250KB, an installer, help files and misc' graphics should bring it to under 1MB.. - ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@dbr_onix I agree. I would love to see a fast, clean, lightweight spreadsheet. The Omni Group (OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, etc...) should make one. Their software is a pleasure to use.
- stmiller, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4It's open source. You could grab the source, open in Xcode and compile a 10.3 version.
- VeritasAequitas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6You obviously haven't worked in tech support, or if you have you're lucky to have not run into users that don't even know how to spell check. I have worked in tech support for years now, mostly for school dist. and believe me this app looks promising, I'm looking into using it for our younger students for the simple fact that M$ Word is kind of overwhelming for them and allows WAY to many options that they don't need. Some people e.g. Digg users look at apps for their many abilities, other people such as young students or teachers close to retirement that don't know much about computers may look at this as an app that and feel that it is simple enough for them to use, and not overwhelming.
- skellener, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Who said Intel only? It's a Universal app.
- Nahor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4@dbr_onix
Tables - it's not free, but it's exactly what you are asking for. I use it all the time, and I dig it. Well worth the small fee, and integrates enough with excel to do most stuff (anything I need to do anyway):
http://www.x-tables.eu/more/overview.html - jpt62089, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Cool beans!
- hackmyballs, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Looks like a really really great idea to me.
Remember the Mozilla Suite turned into Firefox.
Home users need a lightweight but complete, reliable and beautiful word processor.
Not a full blown office suite.
Well, unless Apple gives Pages for free, then everybody would be dead. - ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Your dissertation is about lightweight, open source word processors for the Mac?
- Narkinbarf, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I love this software. I just downloaded it and gave it a test drive. It was only 1.6MB. Very easy to use. The slider bars for indent and stuff is really great. I hate MS word.
- enicholas, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4If you're referring to the folks complaining that it requires 10.4, they are fully justified. Upgrading from 10.3 to 10.4 costs money (typically $129). Only the micro version number (10.4.xx) is upgradable for free.
10.4 is certainly a major upgrade, but I can't imagine why a word processor would require it. It's analogous to a Notepad clone that requires Windows Vista... not to say that Vista isn't a major upgrade from XP, but what Vista-specific feature would a notepad app actually care about? DirectX 10? - dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4A webpage is not a desktop application, no matter how much fancy JavaScript you put in it - Yes, Google Docs and such have their uses, but it's not a replacement for a decent local word processing application
- Robotsu, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4This is great. It's exactly what I was looking for. My sister just got a MacBook for college and she needs something for word processing. We don't want to spend the price on MS Office; OpenOffice, while nice, really sucks to have to be running X11 and is fairly clunky. Something lightweight right in the middle of a text editor and Open Office was the ideal solution, and this seems to be it.
- regeya, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4dbr_onix:
I know it's lame, but try changing your NeoOffice memory settings. I'm not sitting in front of an OS X machine right now (I just use OS X at work, sorry) but in OpenOffice 2.x it's under the Tools -> Options... menu. In the Options dialog box the setting you want is under OpenOffice.org (or maybe NeoOffice? I don't remember) -> Memory. Change Undo -> Number of steps to something more like 10 or 15, graphics cache to something like 16 MB, 4 MB for Memory fo Object, Remove from memory after 5 minutes, and the cache for inserted objects down to 10.
If you've got a G5, I'm betting you have Classic mode installed. If it's running, that'll slow things down significantly; Classic is a MAJOR CPU hog, and in my personal experience RARELY "goes to sleep" as it should. If you don't need it, turn it off before starting NeoOffice. - ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3"Word is PPC, thus that can't be used on the Intel processors"
Nonsense! PPC Word works fine on Intel Macs. It is a little slower but it is faster than NeoOffice on my MacBook. - mshanly, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Actually. Think about it this way, Bean has a lot of potential since it is open source. A good developer could come along and make it feature full and pretty, basically a Microsoft Word clone, but actually looking nice. Open Office isn't as good as everyone says it is, the graphics are very out of date and it doesn't look very appealing really. Sure it has all the functionality but it isn't perfect, so, combine the functionality of Open Office, with good Aqua style graphics and Beans source code and you could just have the best damn OSX Word Processor on the market, for free! :)
- mattsfolio, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The creator of bean is a genius, I have been looking for a substitute for MS Word for ages. Thanks a bunch.
- bpapa, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3quick! Let's all bitch about this FREE software!
- krewenki, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Only minor revision upgrades are free. That means it's free to go from 10.3.1 to 10.3.9. However, you have to purchase the upgrade from 10.3.x to 10.4.x. You'll understand in a few months when Leopard rolls.
- LeVito82, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2It's unusable in the native version because of the massive text rendering problems. Kerning is terribly broken and the characters jump if you select text. It get's even worse the longer your document is. 2.2 was better, but not good anyway. And 2.2 has no ODF support. The X11 variant is - well - X11. And there's no Universal Binary.
Don't misundersand me, I tried it several times and I hoped it could work for me, but it doesn't. It's great on Linux and works well on Windows, but forget it on the Mac.
I use iText Express for simple tasks like letters now:
http://homepage1.nifty.com/lightway/ - puggy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Features: "an Inspector panel with lots of sliders"
<downloads Bean> - deathtoartists, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4no .odt support!
- Breepee, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Has Abiwords ODF-filter improved recently? Last time I checked (beginning of this year) it choked on some fairly standard .odt's I made with OOo.
- vanden9, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Google docs and this are great to use in combo. When your on all major os and dont like Open office google docs is a dream but when on osx i think i just use bean. Shame it not open code other wise i might just port this to windows and linux.
- ninetimes, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2"Can someone tell me what technical features in 10.4 this program uses that are not avaliable in the previous versions?"
I'm not sure since I can't remember what was in 10.3, but this application seems to rely almost entirely on stuff that's built into the OS. Run TextEdit from 10.4 and Bean side-by-side and you'll see that they have almost all the same features. That's because the features are coming from the OS and not the application.
I don't remember what was new to TextEdit in 10.4. Spell-check? Word compatibility? The dictionary? Figure that out and you'll have at least part of your answer. - dpdesign, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@ myself:
Poking around, they used Accessibility stuff all over the interface, which is 10.4 only. - blackjack75, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3One of the advantages of abiword is it supports the opendocument format. Last time I tried the quality of the filter were rather bad but it surely improved since then (I hope so!).
- blackjack75, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2To me it's perfect for most of my uses. The only thing I didn't like in TextEdit is that you couldn't see the aspect of the final page in real time very clearly. This does it. Basic footer and headers wouldn't hurt I guess but I am not sure RTF supports this and you'd have to go for either another proprietary format or OpenDocument (not that easy to implement if people expect to exchange files in both directions).
- leontes, on 10/11/2007, -6/+8This is just worth one damn bean.
Next thing you know you'll be able to use this to march the word "ender" around your screen. -
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