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Aug. 31st, 2012 12:27 pmCompletely random software squee: I know I've posted about this before, but I can't help myself, because every time I launch it, I get happy. I LOVE BEAN. Bean is my word processor. I want to hug it. I love Bean more than I have loved a word processor since the early days of AppleWorks (well, it was ClarisWorks then), and I didn't have much to compare it to, so I wasn't really picky. But ever since the Mac stopped updating AppleWorks (which was back in, er, something like 2004), it's been steadily crashier and buggier, not to mention the creeping knowledge in the back of my head that it was becoming obsolete and eventually I WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO OPEN MY FILES ANYMORE, which is pretty much my worst nightmare.
So I went through a series of word processors that I hated; Open Office was the one I stuck with the longest, even though it was incredibly slow and kept randomly messing things up (like, say, every so often text selection just doesn't work right). Eventually I thought I might have to give up and just write in a plain text editor in order to get what I wanted (a quick, simple, uncluttered program). I only wanted two features that plain text editors don't have: italics, and spell check, without getting all the bloated slowness and zillions of features that all the big word processors have. THAT IS SO SIMPLE. HOW CAN IT BE SO HARD.
(It's the problem of having something really specific that I was trying to find, which no one seemed to be making and I didn't have the skills to make for myself.)
And then Bean descended from the heavens with a chorus of angels singing.
It is PERFECT. It gives me a live word count as I write. It is super fast and stripped-down, it has not crashed or corrupted a file one single time in the months I've been using it, and it doesn't surround my text with useless crap, so when I write all I see are WORDS, without a million useless icons for doing things that I don't need to do. It saves natively in RTF format, which is not only compatible with every other program out there, but is the actual format that many fiction markets require you to submit in, which means all I have to do is add a running header and BAM, READY TO GO! And I recently discovered by accident that it can handle Open Office format, which means I can skip the tedious process of launching Open Office, saving as RTF and opening in Bean in order to access all my old half-written stories; I just open .odt files in Bean and resave as RTF.
(Sadly it only exists for the Mac, as far as I know, but this almost NEVER HAPPENS -- usually I'm the sad Mac owner pawing at the pet-store window with all the cool software on the other side.)
Also, a rec of a completely different nature -- I ran across this post this morning on writing romance and am saving the link here so that I don't lose it. I've been trying to learn to write romance lately, and the first two pieces of advice in particular (thinking about the "wee people inside their heads", i.e. who the characters are without their public face on, and thinking about where they are in their respective life journeys when figuring out how they relate to each other) strike me as super useful not just for writing romance, but for writing in general.
So I went through a series of word processors that I hated; Open Office was the one I stuck with the longest, even though it was incredibly slow and kept randomly messing things up (like, say, every so often text selection just doesn't work right). Eventually I thought I might have to give up and just write in a plain text editor in order to get what I wanted (a quick, simple, uncluttered program). I only wanted two features that plain text editors don't have: italics, and spell check, without getting all the bloated slowness and zillions of features that all the big word processors have. THAT IS SO SIMPLE. HOW CAN IT BE SO HARD.
(It's the problem of having something really specific that I was trying to find, which no one seemed to be making and I didn't have the skills to make for myself.)
And then Bean descended from the heavens with a chorus of angels singing.
It is PERFECT. It gives me a live word count as I write. It is super fast and stripped-down, it has not crashed or corrupted a file one single time in the months I've been using it, and it doesn't surround my text with useless crap, so when I write all I see are WORDS, without a million useless icons for doing things that I don't need to do. It saves natively in RTF format, which is not only compatible with every other program out there, but is the actual format that many fiction markets require you to submit in, which means all I have to do is add a running header and BAM, READY TO GO! And I recently discovered by accident that it can handle Open Office format, which means I can skip the tedious process of launching Open Office, saving as RTF and opening in Bean in order to access all my old half-written stories; I just open .odt files in Bean and resave as RTF.
(Sadly it only exists for the Mac, as far as I know, but this almost NEVER HAPPENS -- usually I'm the sad Mac owner pawing at the pet-store window with all the cool software on the other side.)
Also, a rec of a completely different nature -- I ran across this post this morning on writing romance and am saving the link here so that I don't lose it. I've been trying to learn to write romance lately, and the first two pieces of advice in particular (thinking about the "wee people inside their heads", i.e. who the characters are without their public face on, and thinking about where they are in their respective life journeys when figuring out how they relate to each other) strike me as super useful not just for writing romance, but for writing in general.