About ScrapBean

Why it exists

Paper scrapbooks are lovely and almost nobody finishes one. You need glue, a free weekend and a steady hand. Design apps go the other way: a blank canvas, forty tools and the quiet feeling that you are doing it wrong.

ScrapBean sits in between. You dump things onto a page. It arranges them like someone with good taste and a roll of tape. If you don't like it, you press the dice. A page should take seconds, because a scrapbook that needs an afternoon never gets made.

What it won't do

• It won't ask you to sign up. There is no account, so there is nothing to log in to.
• It won't hold your scrapbooks somewhere else. They are files on your computer.
• It won't make noise uninvited. Videos and sound wait until you press play.
• It won't cut things off. Nothing on a page can slide past the edge and vanish.
• It won't keep moving if you ask it to stop. Turn movement off and it stays off.
• It won't let a plugin help itself. Other people's extras ask first, and go without if you say no.

Free, and what kind of free

ScrapBean is free to download and free to use. There is no paid version and no optional paid service sitting beside it. You get the whole app.

It is not open source. The app's code is closed. We would rather say that plainly here than have you find out in a forum.

What is open is the door for plugins. Anyone can write one, in plain JavaScript, and add commands of their own to the menu. A plugin runs shut in a box, without your files or the internet, and asks before it reads anything of yours. There is no plugin shop yet; plugins are added from a folder.

Made to feel like a desk

Everything in the app is drawn as a real thing: a kraft folder for the menu, a notepad for the tools, enamel buttons, a wooden shelf for your books. It isn't nostalgia for its own sake. Familiar objects need no manual, and a warm desk is a nicer place to keep memories than a grey toolbar.

The doodles on this site are drawn by hand, wobbles included. The wobbles are staying.

Credits

ScrapBean stands on other people's generous work.

• Colourful stickers: Fluent Emoji by Microsoft, MIT licence.
• Icons and simple stickers: Lucide, ISC licence.
• Lettering: Bricolage Grotesque and Shantell Sans, both under the SIL Open Font Licence.
• Photos and animated pictures in the sample pages: Wikimedia Commons contributors, listed below.

The photos of people on this site are not of real people. They were made for these sample pages. The purring and the rain are not real either; the cat was unavailable for recording.