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AppleWorks/ClarisWorks Dies Quietly
Several readers noted that Apple has quietly discontinued AppleWorks, in the week that the company's spreadsheet solution, Numbers, debuted in its iWork suite. The AppleWorks website now directs users to the iWork section of the Apple site. AppleWorks was introduced — before the Macintosh — in 1984 and began its long twilight as abandonware in 1999.
ah, yes, memories of appleworks in highschool computer class on apple IIc's...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
AppleWorks was massively undermaintained, buggy, and really needed work -- but they sacrificed it for iWork, and then kept it around solely for the spreadsheet. I am SO glad to have, finally, a decent and stable spreadsheet for the Mac. (I guess NeoOffice sorta counts, but I like Numbers better.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Fare thee well, AppleWorks - you kept me from having to buy a copy of Office for several years, and at one point knowledge of your inner workings was tremendously helpful at a job (I briefly worked at a small school which had an Apple ][e running AppleWorks in 1998...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Now bring back hypercard, apple! That was so much fun, I programmed graphical interfaces with it when I was 10!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
...And there you will hand by your neck until you are dead, dead, dead!
I still use Appleworks on my Mac's at home. Niether Mac has the specs to run iWork (well, one does if I upgrade the OS from 10.1.5...), and I'll be damned if I'm putting MS Office on them.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Ahhh yes, you can find Appleworks final resting place next to "Apple Presents Apple" on the Ye Olde Softeware shelf. In fact the very sign for "Ye Olde Software Shelf" was done with the Beagle Brothers software which in turn found itself on that very shelf.
R.I.P. once proud software.
Appleworks shipped with MacOS versions 8.x and 9.x has very useful communications and drawing programs, plus a fair spreadsheet program. It is some people at Apple who have abandoned this marvelous suite of programs and not the users themselves. If I'm not mistaken Appleworks was a continuation of and improvement to HyperCard.
Heh, that would explain why Word:mac (aka MS Word) came up when I opened AppleWorks on my new MacBook Pro.
Actually, I have been trying iWork '08 and it's ok. Right now the port of OpenOffice isn't that stable, like freezing when I try to open a CSV file in the spreadsheet. So for the most part, if I don't need to cut-n-paste information, I just use OpenOffice installed by Fink which is X11.
Why-o-why? The same reason apple pretend that no-one uses open formats and containers like: FLAC, vorbis and matroska et al?
Moof!
Thud.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
ClarisWorks was the first application I learned using on dads Macintosh Classic, and I then continued using it until version 5.0. It has helped me with quite a bit of school work.
And yes, I'm young.
It was brilliant. The only "works" package that didn't suck.
Its integrated approach, with text processing, spreadsheet, drawing and database modules in a single application program was rather elegant. For quickly throwing together a document that needs all of those, I still haven't seen anything that beats it.
I was just glad that they made an OS X native version. I don't know about other people, but I have a *lot* of old ClarisWorks and AppleWorks documents sitting around, and they are not something that you can easily batch-convert. (Or at least I don't know of a way to easily batch convert them; if anyone knows how to do that, please feel free to let me know.) I probably go in and open up an old Claris WP document every few weeks or so.
Will the new iWork suite open old Claris/Appleworks documents? It would be nice if they did. I haven't played with the new iWork apps at all (I realized that I don't need a word-processor for most of what I now do, and just use TextMate to butcher ASCII instead).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My first mac was an PM8500, I skipped the G3,s and had a G4, now currently I use a Dual G5, which I will probably still use for another year or two before I really need to switch to an Intel based one or whatever they come out with next. But either way I never used Appleworks/Clarisworks and I don't use iWork or whatever their new one is. I guess I'm an MS Whore, but that's what my work always used and maybe that is why I always used that at home too.
Ave Molech Setting
... there was a 21 MOOF!!! salute.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I used ClarisWorks 3/4 for years under System 7 and OS 8/9. Vector & raster graphics, word processing, page layout, spreadsheet, database -- all there in a package that made creating documents integrating all of those elements reasonably easy. Its capabilities were more limited than other software products in each area, but generally adequate for most desktop needs at the time. A computer *should* have had something exactly like that 10 years ago, especially since that's what most people bought computers for.
Now I do think AppleWorks has definitely been showing its age for a while, and with Apple's new apps up and coming I'm not at all surpised they killed it. But I don't think the ascendancy of the new apps is the whole story. It may be that Apple's realized those things aren't necessarily what people buy machines for by and large anymore. For the average user, the computer is now more of a client/communication tool. The iWork suite plays to that focus by giving Apple users clients for handling/working with common documents.
Tweet, tweet.
I never used Claris Works much (or System 7 in general - our school skipped from Apple IIe to PC, and didn't own any Macs), but it was always my mother's favorite program. My dad said she was constantly cursing at MS Office when she eventually had to switch.
I have used Gobe productive which was a works suite designed by many of the original Claris works developers. It was originally made for BeOS, and latter ported to Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, the company went under, and for a while there was talk of it going open source. I really would have liked to see that happen, as it was a far better piece of software than OpenOffice, and even pledged some money towards it (although not much as I was a college student at the time), but alas it was not to be. They sold the product to someone else who has been maintaining just the windows version.
Back in 1993 when I got my first computer (Mac LC II) with ClarisWorks 2.0, my classmates were struggling with PCs running MS-DOS (oh, horror) and WordPerfect 5.1 (a steaming pile of excrement compared to ClarisWorks). Interapplication communication, PC-style, meant printing your shit and then cutting and pasting the hard way, with glue and scissors.
My smugness knew no bounds...
Just like Open Office and the previously mentioned "possible" adobe office suite, there is no decent database app. That is one major problem with implementing these suites in mid sized businesses. Most of the knuckle head managers in my company can create a database in access even thought they have no idea how a database works ("it looks like a spreadsheet"). Just try explaining how you can use odbc with OOO to your shipping manager.
Until they come up with a way to replace access, I cannot gain traction to even attempt to replace office.
I just installed AppleWorks on my Lombard running Tiger a couple weeks ago. I hadn't touched it for years but suddenly found the need for it and I still knew where the CD-ROM installer disk was.
Just really weird timing.
--Richard
No, all "works" packages sucked. All of them. This one may have sucked a little less, but it still sucked. You know, deep in your heart of hearts, that it sucked, and you hated it. It might take many years of therapy, but, one day, you'll be able to admit this to yourself. The sky will look more blue and somehow more cheerful on that day. You might look for a group of recovering Lotus Notes addicts for advice and support through this, uh, difficult time. Meanwhile, the rest of us are overjoyed.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
But who would do development for Microsoft?
I loved appleworks. In fact I would really like to get an apple 2e emulator. I would like to run ubuntu with the emulator in full screen to do my creative writing. I really though have not missed used since 1993.
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
What an under-rated piece of software. Its integration was way ahead of MS Works. I used Claris Works all the way through college, I had it customized like crazy and had a load of repetitive jobs all automated with ease. I still use Appleworks to this day for preparing documents and simple brochures. I'll carry on using it too. "Prying from cold dead fingers" and all that.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I remember using it on my Apple //. Good old days! It as all text mode, not fancy GUI like Macs' versions.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Eh? eh?
You must mean R&D. Apple would be a huge loss for Microshaft. Gate & Co probably hasn't had a single original technical idea in their whole existence. They just know how to copy it, aggregate it, market it, overprice it, make it proprietary and stagnate everything they touch.
This app pulled my chestnuts out of the fire more than a few times - simple, predictable, page accurate, lightweight, did 80% of Office... with a database, no less!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I knew one of the early developers who worked on it and the amazing thing about ClarisWorks was that in the Mac market it destroyed the market for Microsoft Works. No small feat.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I remember receiving a course from our trainer, Jayesh Valambhia, at Apple Support. We all grew to be Appleworks gurus (of course we continued to say 'Claris', because of that support folder in the system folder, and we denied the claris-to-apple-works update). Cheers Claris, here's looking at you, kid. *pours wine*
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
AppleWorks was introduced -- before the Macintosh -- in 1984
This is completely wrong. The programs each called AppleWorks, one running on the Apple IIc and the other on the Macintosh, were completely different programs with nothing in common but their names. The Macintosh AppleWorks was originally called ClarisWorks after the application-software company that Apple spun off. When Claris was later subsumed by Apple, the name of ClarisWorks was changed to AppleWorks--you all were supposed to have long ago forgotten about the Apple IIc program of the same name 8^).
The AppleWorks of TFA, i.e., for the Macintosh, was introduced in 1990 or 1991. Its level of integration between the components was simply jaw-dropping and as far as I know has never been approached by any other product. AppleWorks was a precursor to a revolutionary technology that was being developed at Apple that would eliminate the concept of "application-centric" workflows and replace it with "document-centric" workflows using a newly developed component technology whose name I can't remember right now (OpenDoc???). A few programs that fully practiced the new technology were developed by third parties as Apple made the APIs available; Apple themselves made the highly vaunted Cyberdog program. However, Apple's woes of the mid-1990s forced them to drop many of the cool technologies that they were working on, including this component technology. It is a little hard to explain (if you've never used AppleWorks) but the idea was that a document lived in a window and whatever software you needed to work on the document would be available without switching programs--some programs could be containers and others would be components, like plug-ins. You would just work in a container program (sometimes it didn't even matter what the program was, as long as it had the right components available). The third party action was really starting to heat up when Apple pulled the plug on the whole deal, apparently in an attempt to stay alive by cutting costs.
- it was the only 'office' app included w/my iBook G4!
- thank Gawd there's Pirate Bay - i just snarfed MS Orifice 2004 for the Mac!
- Way to go, Apple! I'm now a MS Luser!
(NeoOrifice is a dawg on my lappie)
Brings back good memories of writing schoolpapers on my IIgs in appleworks. Then taking contant breaks to play Last Ninja and Thexder (^_^)
We still use AppleWorks every day at our business. Apple was still supporting it with updates even fairly recently - to make it work with the Intel chips - I suspect we will continue to use it because it meets our needs and runs on OS X.
I've done more than a little with AppleWorks in my time too; in fact, I used it some Tuesday night at gaming.
AppleWorks has (I've still got an install disk and updater, so neener) a nifty paradigm for documents. A document can hold text or graphics. The spreadsheet can be spread out on a drawing document in small pieces by opening views onto different parts of a spreadsheet. Thus, a document can be spread out across ten or eleven little boxes on a single page.
I thought that would make AppleWorks hard to give up, and combined with the other parts of it, I may still keep it around for a good long time (Intel processor on my next computer notwithstanding).
When I got Numbers, of course I could create as many two-and-three-column spreadsheets on the page as I wanted and link them together. A second sheet contained the "hidden" information which the other tables use for lookups. And the creative lookup scheme I was able to assemble made life a little easier.
So I've got a new character sheet. I'll still look back, but I don't regret the move.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
- trying the educate /. idiots on true computing history is worthless... the clueless kiddie-winks and slackers in the industry have no interest in truth or real history - only what subsumes their current interests (i.e., global warming, etc.)
- but thanks for setting out some facts...
... that Apple no longer works? I knew I was sticking to Windows for a reason!
" Its level of integration between the components was simply jaw-dropping and as far as I know has never been approached by any other product."
I think GOBE Productive on BeOS was aiming for the kind of integration Appleworks provided. Unfortunately I never got around to purchasing it, so I can't give you a first-hand confirmation of that.
So I am no Mac user, but back in high school, I loved ClarisWork on 'em System 9 computer... So, Apple killed AppleWork, which is the descendant of ClarisWork, and instead links to iWork...Is this just a name change? Or is iWork a completely different piece of software...Sorry for being ignorant about the Mac world...
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
^^ that should be +1 funny not -1 offtopic I was like PMSL :D
As a former Mac word processor dissident, this really brings back some memories. I mean on the first computer I ever owned, a Power Computing 604e machine (Mac Clone) I insisted on using ClarisWorks 4 throughout high school for all my papers. For a few months I defected, but only to use the equally awesome Nisus Writer. I'm not sure if Nisus Writer still exists, but I remember it being a powerful, yet easy to use word processor with lots of cool features. Anyway, I've long since sold out to MS Office for Mac. When I got my G4 desktop for college, it came with Word and I just decided to give in and use the best tool available. I mean for a while ClarisWorks was pretty compatible, but by 2001 it was a good bet to use MS Word to ensure cross-platform compatibility. Or maybe I'm just rationalizing a poor decision...sigh.
HyperCard was more like an early version of the web, only the whole "site" had to be contained in one file and you downloaded it (or sneakernetted it) instead of accessing it remotely. A HyperCard stack was a series of interactive pages (cards) containing text and graphics and other elements (later any QT file could be embedded), any of which could link to other pages in the stack just like a hyperlink in an HTML doc.
AppleWorks was an office suite containing a word processor and spreadsheet, draw and paint programs, and database and communications programs (I gather the later was something like telnet, though I never made use of it or the database myself). It had nothing at all to do with HyperCard and was nothing at all like it. Where are you drawing that comparison from?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Alas poor Clarus, I knew him Horatio...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
AW WP does OK into Pages with pretty high fidelity.
Surprisingly, objects cut and paste from PageMaker under Classic into Pages in OSX. (I know, I know... it's almost over...)
AW SS to Numbers is a problem.
I just moved 20 years of cycling mileage and analysis to Numbers.
Formulas do OK, there are three trouble spots I've found:
- Charts come in with some object groupings broken, so there are pieces of them disconnected.
- Data points in series have a different collection of symbols, which don't seem size-able.
- I haven't found a way to split a spreadsheet window so you can have a summary line viewable in a different pane from data lines.
Maybe I haven't explored the paradigm for Numbers enough.
Pages does have some suggestions that I know I submitted, likely others:
- the default behavior of objects in "layout" mode is to float/nowrap, not inline.
- there is a format bar, which is a great recovery of screen real estate over the fonts sheet, though the sheet is still one stop shopping.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"It is a little hard to explain (if you've never used AppleWorks) but the idea was that a document lived in a window and whatever software you needed to work on the document would be available without switching programs--some programs could be containers and others would be components, like plug-ins. You would just work in a container program (sometimes it didn't even matter what the program was, as long as it had the right components available)."
It's kind of like the web today, with Flash content here, Java there, HTML around it, only read-write rather than read-only. I still keep the OpenDoc installer CD around since it's fun to be able to actually play around with it.
It's like trying to bring the Studebaker back. The company died. Basically, they sell rebadged IBM hardware that runs a strange third-party OS.
I don't need a do-everything app like FileMaker. I use the AppleWorks database module a lot and it does everything I need. Guess I'll just keep on using it as long as it works for me.
I found this a very interesting read. A Brief History of ClarisWorks As someone who had a small part in the ClarisWorks software, it is indeed a sad day. What Bob Hearn and the two Scott's (Scott Holdaway and Scott Lindsey) accomplished was amazing. Later others joined the team. These guys were devastatingly talented engineers. Microsoft was constantly trying to hire these guys away from Claris. Later after Bob and Scott left, they did hire away a lot of the development team.
The integration in ClarisWorks was amazing in the way you could seamlessly embed frames inside one another. I remember a QA tester writing up a bug because a development version crashed due to low memory when a thousand (or something like that) spreadsheet frames were inserted into a footnote of a word processing document. Spreadsheet frames in a footnote! Now that's integration!
Yes, it was called OpenDoc, and I really thought that document-centric computing was the way to go. Well, I still do, I've just given up hope.
The idea is simple: we want context-rich documents, with different kinds of information and presentation as necessary. So, work on the document until it's done, by opening a different software component for each kind of content. The document's always there, the software comes and goes. Compare that to how I work now, with production suites of huge complexity and vast feature sets, but awkward interoperability. In this software utopia, we would have only bought the features we would actually use, and it was all about integration, and not being distracted from the main thing: the document.
Unfortunately, it died before the bugs could be worked out (the few available components were nowhere near optimized yet, buggy and slow).
AppleWorks was a transition example of this: a monolithic program that was document-centric, so that you could kind of 'have it all' if your needs weren't too extreme. I suspect that in the big plan it might have had a place weaning us off of the application-centric software economy.
The third party action was really starting to heat up when Apple pulled the plug on the whole deal, apparently in an attempt to stay alive by cutting costs.I wonder about that... [tinfoilhat mode] I'm sure some big money would have been lost if this paradigm had caught on... a blossoming of garage businesses to compete with, it would have been a major shift. I wonder if some horse trading went on to encourage them to "knife the baby". [/tinfoilhat]
Damn those pesky terrorists
"AppleWorks was introduced -- before the Macintosh -- in 1984"
This is completely wrong. The programs each called AppleWorks, one running on the Apple IIc and the other on the Macintosh, were completely different programs with nothing in common but their names.
That doesn't make it wrong. Slightly misleading, perhaps, but not wrong: AppleWorks *was* introduced in 1984.
Are you going to go to Wikipedia now and change the part that says the VW Beatle was introduced in 1938, because it was a completely different car than what is now a VW Beatle? Oh noes!
This is a pity. AppleWorks was the best Works/Office tool I've ever used. The main advantage it has is that all components can be mixed and matched easily. Want a spreadsheet in your word document? Just create one and have the full power of the spreadsheet tool inside your text document. No slow OLE (or whatever it is called right now) stuff. No missing features.
It's just a great application. Too bad that Apple killed it, although the writing has been on the wall for years.
Yeah, AppleWorks basically feels like OpenDoc in one app. I think it did eventually become a real OpenDoc container before Apple killed OpenDoc, too.
Slightly off topic, but have you seen the 6502 assembler written javascript? You can enter code, compile, run and get a hexdump of it. I had some fun recently writing simple programs with it. I never liked Assembler although the macrosoft addition was a neat thing. I was a Big Mac assembler user back in the Apple ][ days.
http://www.6502asm.com/
... when somebody holds a funeral and nobody comes?
***Foucault is watching you..***
Clarus the DogCow have a long-standing relationship of mutual disrespect. Claris the company provided some of Apple's best early software, including MacDraw and MacPaint and FileMake -- as well as the infamous turd known as AppleWorks.
"1989 - the legendary TechNote 31
In April 1989 Mark Harlan, with the help of Mark Johnson, wrote TechNote 31 as an April Fools' Day joke for Apple's developer community. It clarified certain matters regarding the Dogcow. Mark also revealed her real name: Clarus (a private joke about an internal Apple project named Claris that was terribly late at that time).
By now, Clarus was known outside of Apple labs and it seems that even Microsoft used her in an advertisement! Later Microsoft also used her in PowerPoint."
http://clarus.chez-alice.fr/ENGLISH/history.html
***Foucault is watching you..***
I'm looking forward to switching to iWork now that Apple's got a spreadsheet module in there. But they still haven't replaced the Drawing/Painting modules! I use Appleworks Paint to remove extraneous arrows or labeling from graphics I put in slideshows or to knit photos together for small panoramics. Its amazing how useful that Magic Lasso tool is! There are a lot of simple things that I just can't figure out how to do in Photoshop.
I've using the ancient UNIX line editor for much of my text composition for 31 years and all my coworkers make fun of me for that. Now if that ever went away I'd be in trouble!
I think that ClarisWorks 2.1 was the ultimate suite. It was tiny and fast and truly integrated, in contrast to MS Office, which is so un-integrated that the various applications don't share so much as a common file open/save dialog. With ClarisWorks 2.1, in one document, you could have text, a bitmap picture, a vector image, a spreadsheet and database fields. It was also a terminal emulator. ClarisWorks 3 and 4 were essentially the same, except that some useless fluff was added.
ClarisWorks 2.1 is dead! Long live ClarisWorks 2.1!
And in a way, it does live on at my house. I have recently re-furbished an Emate for my toddler. NewtWorks is basically ClarisWorks 2.1, right down to the keyboard shortcuts!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
[insert sarcastic tone]
Sure, but we got other cool technologies, like the Geoport Modem. Man, I miss that thing! What a workhorse.
Make love, not reality television.
Or not. ;-)
Now that no one is reading this story any more, can anyone suggest a replacement for Draw? I've been using it for about 20 years now and haven't seen a decent equivalent.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
Quite right, and even before OpenDoc, it was OLE done correctly. Unlike Microsoft, whom even after all these years can't get it right.
I use to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.