James Hoover, the developer of Bean, writes:

The venerable Bean word processor has been around since 2006, evolving while keeping a focus on speed, stability and simplicity. Folks liked the live word count (thanks again to Keith Blount for the code), the full screen mode, alternate editing colors, and the zoom slider. Later versions added features that continue to make Bean distinctive, such as split window editing and a tabbed document interface.

After the release of Bean 3.2.2, active development of Bean will cease. Bean will remain available for download at the bean-osx.com website. It may even be updated as necessary to keep the app running on future versions of OS X. Also, I’ll try to continue technical support at the usual email address.

Bean has been my word processor of choice for all my PowerPC Macs, and I’ve been keeping an up-to-date copy on my MacBook Pro as well. It is really a great tool and it’s a pity it won’t be developed in the future, although I fully understand Hoover’s reasons. Free tools of this quality are a rare find, so I’ll keep relying on it when I have to handle documents on my PowerBooks and other PowerPC Macs running Tiger or Leopard. 

This line in Hoover’s announcement saddened me in particular (emphasis mine):

Also, fewer and fewer people will use Bean in the future since I do not publish Bean on the App Store (which sells numerous closed-source rip-offs compiled from the GPL v.1‑licensed Bean 2.x source code).

And on a closing note, I want to publicly thank James Hoover for all the time and efforts he has been putting into this project for the past six years.