Bean is a small, easy-to-use, and free rich text editor and lightweight word processor that supports open/save of Microsoft Word format (.doc and .xml) documents (less images). Lean, fast and with an attractive, uncluttered user interface Bean starts up almost instantly on my not exactly cutting-edge 2.0 GHz Macbook, but still has cool stuff like a live word count, page layout mode, full-screen mode, split-screen mode, regular expression search/replace, multi-column text, inline graphics, detailed statistics, and more word-crunching and document formatting bells and whistles.

Mariner Software has turned 20—quite an achievement for a software company that started out competing against Microsoft with Mariner Write and Mariner Calc. They’ve since added numerous more proprietary programs, such as Montage, StoryMill, and MacJournal. And this weekend, the majority of their Macintosh products on sale for 40% off.

In late August / early September, Appletell ran a giveaway in cooperation with the good folks at Storyist for two free copies of their recently released Storyist 2 novel/screenwriting software. To enter, contestants simply had to tell us the title of the work they’d write with the software, and the staff at the Storyist would choose the two they felt were teh best. The submissions are in, and the winners have been selected.

Today is the last day we’ll be accepting entries in our Storyist 2 giveaway. Two entrants will be awarded free registration numbers for the download version of this last iteration of the popular novel/screenwriting software. If you’ve ever had a great idea for a novel or movie but didn’t know how to go about getting it started, Storyist 2 is perfect for helping you to organize, format, and complete your projec

Are you one of those people who complain every year because you’re tired of remakes and sequels and Hollywood just isn’t putting out anything good anymore? Well, there are two things you can do about. First, dig past Entertainment Tonight for your movie options. Second, write your own movie. It’s seriously not that hard, and we’ve even got some free software to help you get started. To win a copy of Storyist 2, you just need to give us your title.

Nisus Software, Inc. has announced that from now until January 21, they are offering both Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro at 15% off the regular price. The discount also works for upgrades, family packs, and even the Nisus Writer Pro printed manual.

Nisus Software has announced the release of Nisus Writer Pro 1.2. This latest version of their critically acclaimed (and my personal favorite) word processor adds a completely new file importer that improves file translations, especially for the .doc format. Additionally, export as Word file format (.doc) and the Open Document (.odt) format has been added. The Table of Contents feature also has a few new options: tab/backtab can be used to promote or demote TOC levels, and TOC entries can be rearranged by drag and drop within the navigator pane.

Other new features include automatically updating time stamps, Flesch and Kincaid reading ease scores, additional backup options, a Macroize menu, and editable document properties (author, company, copyright, etc.). There have also been additions to the Nisus Macro Language. A host of bug fixes and other enhancements have also been included.

Of these updates, I’m most curious to try out the new Word translations. Find out why after the break.