14 DAY TRIAL // Bean is a simple and efficient word processor developed by James Hoover for users of an Apple Macintosh running Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard. For those who’ve embraced the latest version of Apple’s operating system, yet cling to the simple ‘word’ app they’ve been using every day, a new version of Bean has been released to the public, bringing Snow Leopard-specific fixes and tweaks. As a user of the app, I can personally pledge to the must-have-ness of this update.
With the release of Bean 2.4.2 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Bean does automatic text substitution by default. Text substitutions are controlled by accessing System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Symbol and Text Substitution, while the feature can be turned off during an editing session by unchecking Substitutions > Text Replacement in the context menu of the document.
Another Snow Leopard bug fixed in this release concerns double-clicking a file for opening it with Bean. Personally, I was close to giving up on the program because of this single inconvenience. Every user has their habits, so everyone must have been waiting for a certain bug fix. This is the bug I was waiting to be fixed.
“Under Snow Leopard, when you double-click a document icon in the Finder, the filename extension determines what application opens the file,” the description reads. “This means that an .rtf or .rtfd document created in Bean opens (by default) in Text Edit. Since this is probably not the expected behavior, I've changed the code so that .rtf and .rtfd files saved in Bean now open in Bean (by using the Finder's 'Open With...' override),” the developer has informed, to my delight. “Files in other formats saved by Bean will still open in the default application associated with that file (usually, Text Edit).”
The developer explains that users can disable this behavior just as well. To do so, they must quit Bean and paste a certain command into a Terminal.app session. Head here to see what that command is, as well as other commands and actions via Terminal.app.
Lastly, developer James Hoover instructs those who want to associate Bean with all document files of a particular type to select 'Change All...' in the Finder's 'Get Info...' panel. Also worth noting for those running Snow Leopard is that they must enable the individual Services offered by Bean if they wish them to appear in the Services menu and the document's context menu.