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.

Comments

memories

[greywire]

ah, yes, memories of appleworks in highschool computer class on apple IIc's...

Re:memories

[charleste]

First good old Word Perfect 1.0a for Mac was gone (not ported)... and now my Claris/AppleWorks too?! Sigh! Another reason to not upgrade my G5 :-)

Re:memories

[sporadic]

AppleWorks (and to a less degree, AppleWorks GS) got me through high school and college (80-mid 90's) as an English Lit/Polysci major. With the Beagle Bros' TimeOut series of add-ons, there was nothing AW couldn't handle! Ah, the good old days! Running it on an Apple IIgs with 8MG, SCSI HD, and ZipGSX accelerator, the 8-bit text based AW flew like a bat out of hell! And being the geek that I was (and still am,) I used to track all my games with the Database :) I still have the IIe and IIgs in my closet, plus a crapload of 5.25 and 3.5 floppies. Maybe I'll take them out this weekend and see if they still work. Pretty sure the machines still work.

Sporadic

Re:memories

[Anonymous Coward]

But dang my Commodore 64 and 128 could run rings around the Snapple ][! Built in graphics and sounds co-processors that were years ahead of what Snapple was doing. Even the floppy drives had their own CPU unlike Snapple's. All that co-processor power delivered productivity power that was unmatched!

But then Commodore had IDIOTS for management!

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OK that should get things heated up in here :-)

Re:memories

[Gilmoure]

I used Word 5.1a the last time I did a term paper, a couple years ago. I love how it launches in 2 seconds on my G5.

Now there's an idea; gather up a bunch of old but working apps, that are lightning fast on current hardware and bundle them for the mobile market.

Re:Finally.

[nine-times]

Well, yeah. Appleworks hadn't really seen a significant update in, what, more than 5 years? I was always surprised to learn that it was still being sold.

I'd see it on the shelf at BestBuy and think, "Really?! Appleworks? Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"

iWork and no ODF support

[Anonymous Coward]

Why-o-why? The same reason apple pretend that no-one uses open formats and containers like: FLAC, vorbis and matroska et al?

Pity

[hcdejong]

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.

Re:Pity

[brownsteve]

Here is a fascinating history of ClarisWorks from one of its original authors. It was quite an accomplishment to pack all that functionality into a megabyte of RAM. Ahh... nostalgia...

Good thing they kept it around.

[Kadin2048]

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).

Re:Good thing they kept it around.

[MightyYar]

It can't be THAT Mac-centric... there's been a Windows version since at least 4.0.

Re:Finally.

[Nimey]

The last update of Appleworks was so that it doesn't require Classic. It's /that/ neglected.

Re:Finally.

[shelterpaw]

Numbers is very cool, but it has a long way to go. Granted it's version 1.

My biggest complaints with numbers:

1. No Apple Script Support - an Apple application with no AppleScript support WTF????
2. No Dynamic Linking between Numbers and Pages - This killed it for me.
3. Extremely extreeeemly slow. - I could take a nap...
4. Numerous Bugs. - It's version 1, but damn...

However, it's a nice spreadsheet app and once they fix/add features, it'll be a welcome replacement for MS Office.

Re:NeoOffice?

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention the Ghost of Jef Raskin haunts you if you use NeoOffice. The interface in AppleWorks feels dated, but at least it used to be good. NeoOffice never was.

Re:pity the foo

[Otter]

You might look for a group of recovering Lotus Notes addicts for advice and support through this, uh, difficult time.

Meanwhile, Lotus Notes 8 is being released tomorrow! If one of the two had to survive, I'd much rather it were AppleWorks.

Seconded, and for the oddest application

[Crash Culligan]

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.

Re:hypercard

[Nitewing98]

Hypercard has been (sort of) given a second life as Applescript Studio, since Applescript is basically Hypertalk in the first place. The difference being that now you can write real applications instead of "stacks."

I mourn the loss of AW. It's been a good friend and true for 20+ years. It deserved a better obituary than what Apple gave it after all those years of service: http://nitewing98.blogspot.com/2007/08/appleworks- dead-at-23.html

Re:hypercard

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly doubt Apple will revive HyperCard. However, a very good alternative exists. It's called Revolution and it's cross-platform for Windows 98/Me/XP/Vista, Mac Classic and OS X, various flavors of Linux and Unix, and can even be used as a CGI on web servers. Of course it's full color, supports the latest visual effects, has object-oriented/vector graphics, and has corrected virtually all of the limitations of the old HyperCard. (For example, it's compiled, not interpreted -- without sacrificing the ease-of-development HyperCard had -- so it runs very fast.)

It has full libraries for XML and various Internet/Sockets operations, an integrated database engine (SQLite) and native support for MySQL (no ODBC drivers needed) and a number of other databases. It's a great front-end for DB systems (especially when you consider there's no per-set cost, because you can create royalty-free standalone executables on any of the supported platforms).

You'll find more info on it at http://www.runrev.com/

If you want to program in HyperCard's beautiful natural language, Revolution is really the best way to go. There are other clones out there but they are either woefully unfinished (PythonCard), support only Mac (SuperCard), or are designed for kids.