[Strawtag]

I was able to open the same document in Classic AppleWorks using SheepShaver and Appleworks for OS X.

[kendallpb]

If you don't want to buy Pages for word processing, you could use the Pages trial to open your files and then copy/paste the rich text into something else (e.g., one of the OpenOffice derivatives). I don't have any Appleworks spreadsheets to transfer to another program, but I'm guessing that might also work (Appleworks-->Numbers-->copy/paste into another program). Pages is cheap compared to Word, but expensive compared to free OpenOffice and its variants.

[kendallpb]

P.S. I forgot to say: I found one of my Appleworks docs won't open in Pages. I can get text out of it by opening it in a text editor, but that's annoying. Time to track down my old MacLinksPlus CD and boot up my old PowerMac G4. ;-)

[haineux]

eromer, on 29 June 2011 - 03:50 PM, said:

In other words, not just "what is a good word processor?," but "what is a good word processor for the user who loves the simplicity, intuitiveness and I'm-in-control-of-the-software-not-vice-versa of AppleWorks?" (Can you tell I like AW? Can you tell I dislike Word?)

I use TextEdit for all my word processing needs. Seriously.

[mosley]

Can someone please point me in the direction of something like AppleWork's easy to use spell checker?

Even now it is quicker to cmd A, cmd C and cmd V a block of text into AppleWorks (using cmd tab) followed by cmd = to bring up the spellchecker that gives up to 6 options for each badly spelt word and......joy oh joy....... a cmd + number to pick any of those 6 options. It's lightening fast and so easy to use with no trackpad input and mostly accomplished with the left hand (for a right-hander!). As each word is corrected spell checker automatically moves onto the next. In Pages you have to select the correct word with the cursor. Sooooo laborious.

[D_Ashley]

The problem with all of this 'time to move to a more forward word processing' drivel is that it totally discounts the previous work users have done setting up and saving countless templates and documents already created. 'Moving forward' that may be fine for you 'gamer' types, but for those who run businesses and 10 years or more of real work saved, its an absolute and needless pain.

Solution? Certainly it's _NOT_ to buy more Apple software. I've been a Mac user for over 20 years, and for as long as there has been a Mac, Apple has a history of developing a good software product and then dropping it like a rock. MacPaint. MacDraw. MacWrite. Heck, they even bought FileMaker and, from my vantage point, they are slowly stifling that product to a slow death.

AppleWorks was (and still is) a killer productivity product, which Apple 'helped' develop, then marketed and promptly neglected.

So WHY for goodness sakes would anyone in their right mind switch to Apple's Pages, etc.? It has miniscule market share, and Apple will surely leave it for dead in a few years. For all the marketing hoopla of Apple's 'iWorks', that 'package' is nowhere near as functional and time-saving as ClarisWorks/AppleWorks still is.

SHAME on multi-billion-dollar Apple for such totally poor, poor long-term support of their software! Heck, even FireFox offers better Mac support than Safari. (Until a month or two ago their version 3.6 was the only current browser that still supported OS 10.4 as well as 10.5 and 10.6.)

Curiously, only iTunes (ching-ching) gets regularly updated for older OS versions. Hmmm, I wonder if the 'gimme your credit card number' feature of iTunes has something to do with that.

To all the 'I-wanna-be-an-Apple-sucker' people out there, go ahead and buy Apple software. You'll be crying later when Apple drops it to make another, does-the-same-thing software package. Me, I'm sticking with my AppleWorks and older MacOS' till I find a real solution. It will likely be from a company that makes its living selling its software, and thus has an interest in maintaing and support that software. Heck, I'd rely on Microsoft or NeoOffice before I would buy another Apple package.

And, yes, I really can live without the latest icons. Oooooh...

[bastion]

D_Ashley, on 30 June 2011 - 05:02 AM, said:

The problem with all of this 'time to move to a more forward word processing' drivel is that it totally discounts the previous work users have done setting up and saving countless templates and documents already created. 'Moving forward' that may be fine for you 'gamer' types, but for those who run businesses and 10 years or more of real work saved, its an absolute and needless pain.

I don't think you're being fair to any group you've identified here. Nobody is discounting the work we've done over the years. The spirit of these articles is to point out that these are dead products and dead formats and if you intend to move forward with the OS you're going to have to go through some sort of migration process. Apple's stuck here in a way, too. They're not just gratuitously dropping products left and right. Their real and prospective market compels them to keep moving forward, and some old software - and AppleWorks was very old as software goes - takes more effort to keep compatible than is justified by the revenue it generates. So we get import functionality and newer tools that do most of what most people need and are much easier to support both today and in the future.

Quote

Solution? Certainly it's _NOT_ to buy more Apple software. I've been a Mac user for over 20 years, and for as long as there has been a Mac, Apple has a history of developing a good software product and then dropping it like a rock. MacPaint. MacDraw. MacWrite. Heck, they even bought FileMaker and, from my vantage point, they are slowly stifling that product to a slow death.

I don't understand this last bit. FMP is incredibly popular and aggressively developed.

Quote

AppleWorks was (and still is) a killer productivity product, which Apple 'helped' develop, then marketed and promptly neglected.

Promptly? The product was sold and supported for 16 years. It was actively developed for about a decade, including a non-trivial migration from the traditional Mac Toolbox to Carbon in the OS X era.

Quote

Curiously, only iTunes (ching-ching) gets regularly updated for older OS versions. Hmmm, I wonder if the 'gimme your credit card number' feature of iTunes has something to do with that.

Unlikely, given that the iTunes store is well-documented to barely break even.

Quote

To all the 'I-wanna-be-an-Apple-sucker' people out there, .... And, yes, I really can live without the latest icons. Oooooh...

Ah. I see. You're a troll.

[dougeddy70]

bastion, on 29 June 2011 - 01:53 PM, said:

JimShea, on 29 June 2011 - 11:51 AM, said:

Remember MacLinkPlus? The utility was able to convert AppleWorks files to other formats.

Yep. Great product. The developer is local to me. I don't know why they dropped it. I'm concerned about their apparent focus on the lamentable Passwords Plus.

As am I. Passwords Plus is a great product. I love 1Password but it is more complicated to me than Passwords Plus. Loved MacLinkPlus, too. I guess they have decided they no longer need to support such excellent products, which is why I don't buy their other offerings.

Sad Apple doesn't give us a simple means to import the old Appleworks files, and yes, a database to iWorks would be helpful to many, including me.

[Chris Breen]

D_Ashley, on 30 June 2011 - 05:02 AM, said:

So WHY for goodness sakes would anyone in their right mind switch to Apple's Pages, etc.? It has miniscule market share, and Apple will surely leave it for dead in a few years.

Assuming that you're here not simply to tell the kids to get off your lawn, let me try to help with this one.

In the decade since AppleWorks died, the software industry learned a few lessons. One of them was that proprietary formats are not all that hot an idea. When a product like AppleWorks has seen its last, those who've stubbornly clung to it (despite the very large writing on the wall and the many years they've had to make a transition) are stuck. So, when possible, developers started supporting standard formats for their files—pdf, text, rtf, xls, and doc, for example. The iWork applications are far more forgiving in this regard than AppleWorks ever was. (And certainly the other dinosaurs you mentioned—MacWrite and MacPaint.)

With the App Store, the shift is on to cheaper, less bloated applications. Given that, I'd be less concerned about the longevity of iWork.

[MackyMoto]

Will Pages and Numbers be able to open AppleWorks docs in the new Lion OS, or do I have to convert all my AW docs while still in Snow Leopard?

[bastion]

dougeddy70, on 30 June 2011 - 07:43 AM, said:

bastion, on 29 June 2011 - 01:53 PM, said:

JimShea, on 29 June 2011 - 11:51 AM, said:

Remember MacLinkPlus? The utility was able to convert AppleWorks files to other formats.

Yep. Great product. The developer is local to me. I don't know why they dropped it. I'm concerned about their apparent focus on the lamentable Passwords Plus.

As am I. Passwords Plus is a great product. I love 1Password but it is more complicated to me than Passwords Plus. Loved MacLinkPlus, too. I guess they have decided they no longer need to support such excellent products, which is why I don't buy their other offerings.

Actually, you have an opinion opposed to mine on Passwords Plus. I'm concerned that they're focussing too much on it. I was an early adopter and I really wanted to like it, but it was always very flaky for me. Very slow to launch and routinely broke synching with my PDA.

Quote

Sad Apple doesn't give us a simple means to import the old Appleworks files, and yes, a database to iWorks would be helpful to many, including me.

The ability to directly import AW word processor, spreadsheet and presentation documents in iWork doesn't count as simple?

[bastion]

Chris Breen, on 30 June 2011 - 08:12 AM, said:

D_Ashley, on 30 June 2011 - 05:02 AM, said:

So WHY for goodness sakes would anyone in their right mind switch to Apple's Pages, etc.? It has miniscule market share, and Apple will surely leave it for dead in a few years.

Assuming that you're here not simply to tell the kids to get off your lawn, let me try to help with this one.

In the decade since AppleWorks died, the software industry learned a few lessons. One of them was that proprietary formats are not all that hot an idea. When a product like AppleWorks has seen its last, those who've stubbornly clung to it (despite the very large writing on the wall and the many years they've had to make a transition) are stuck. So, when possible, developers started supporting standard formats for their files—pdf, text, rtf, xls, and doc, for example. The iWork applications are far more forgiving in this regard than AppleWorks ever was. (And certainly the other dinosaurs you mentioned—MacWrite and MacPaint.)

With the App Store, the shift is on to cheaper, less bloated applications. Given that, I'd be less concerned about the longevity of iWork.

It should also be noted that while iWork's documents - at least Pages and Numbers...I'm really not familiar with Keynote - are proprietary they're actually very easily parsable. I think at present it wouldn't be a major challenge to write a Pages or Numbers importer with no help from Apple.

[technologist]

Chris Breen, on 30 June 2011 - 08:12 AM, said:

In the decade since AppleWorks died, the software industry learned a few lessons. One of them was that proprietary formats are not all that hot an idea. When a product like AppleWorks has seen its last, those who've stubbornly clung to it (despite the very large writing on the wall and the many years they've had to make a transition) are stuck. So, when possible, developers started supporting standard formats for their files—pdf, text, rtf, xls, and doc, for example. The iWork applications are far more forgiving in this regard than AppleWorks ever was. [...]

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Let's compare, shall we?

PDF? Yes, iWork exports to PDF. So do all OS X apps that support printing, including pathetic old AppleWorks. Verdict: tie.
Text? Pages imports and exports plain text. So does virtually every word processor in existence, including lame old AppleWorks. Verdict: tie.
RTF? Pages opens and exports RTF documents. Whaddya know, so did AppleWorks 6. Verdict: tie.
XLS...yup, Numbers will open and export XLS files. And AppleWorks opened them and exported them, too. Verdict: tie.
DOC: Suffice to say, tie.

Now, import and export are one thing. What about native formats? AppleWorks used the proprietary binary .cwk format, whereas iWork uses zip-compressed folders of XML. Progress, I guess, since it'll be a little bit easier to reverse-engineer the formats whenever Apple abandons its latest productivity package. But so far, iWork is no more interoperable than AppleWorks was, and no applications other than the iWork suite themselves support the iWork formats.

[cassandra]

How can I save my data base now in FMPro 6?
I really can't afford to lose it,