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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.
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 Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"
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.
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."
... there was a 21 MOOF!!! salute.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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...
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.
The last update of Appleworks was so that it doesn't require Classic. It's /that/ neglected.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I bought AppleWorks, knowing full well that it was "abandonware," and that I will never see an upgrade. I bought it because it is native OS X, it is very easy to use, it is very well integrated, it does its job and does it very well, and it opens old AppleWorks and ClarisWorks files. It is a very good piece of software.
iWorks has some very nice programs. I use Pages -- for page layout it is nicer than AppleWorks. But iWorks still doesn't offer everything that AppleWorks did -- no paint tool, no draw tool, no database tool -- so even if (or when) I upgrade my iWorks to iWorks '08 I will still find uses for AppleWorks.
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."
Whenever Steve was in one of his "moods," programmers would be all, "I'm working on AppleWorks!" and when Steve continued down the hall they expose'd out to get back to composing porn music on GarageBand.
Have you tried them on FileMaker? Version 9 just came out and is pretty cool. It integrates really well with Office stuff and is dead simple to start using. Apple is not going to include a database app with iWork as long as FileMaker is around.
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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#1"
20 FOR I=1 TO 200
30 PRINT "I WILL NOT THROW PAPER AIRPLANES IN CLASS."
40 NEXT I
50 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#0"
120 cps from an Imagewriter is a hell of a lot faster than I could (or can) write. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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."
- dead-at-23.html
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
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Why do people measure the quality of a piece of software by how often it's patched? If a piece of software runs well and does the job, then it's a good piece of software. If a piece of software does not run well and does not succeed in doing the job, then it needs to be patched frequently. If AppleWorks worked well for folks, then why was it dead years ago because no one patched holes that weren't there? As for adding features, you only add features, hopefully, when you seriously NEED to add a feature. Otherwise, it's called BLOAT.
You kill off a piece of software when you want to sell something new and justify paying developers to rewrite the whole thing. Mostly, it's a marketing move in order to move new product by engendering "excitement" in suckers who think that their old functional tool isn't any good anymore.
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
That's completely wrong. Apple broke Claris in two: one half was left with the FileMaker database and reformed into FileMaker Inc.; the other half was reabsorbed directly into Apple. That's why ClarisWorks turned into AppleWorks and began being sold by Apple directly. Wikipedia, as always, has a nice overview.
Realize that HyperCard was actually ment as a database and presentation program, and as a drawing program, say Access, Powerpoint, and Paint combined. Maybe you could also add Flash to the list.
The normal idea to use it was that your database of costumers or whatever would be a stack of cards, and there was a simple GUI to make your own GUI to interact with the stack of cards. Already quite nice that this was easy to do, but just imagine that you could also fill the cards with pictures and whatever, and 10 year olds can actually make a simple interactive game out of it! That deserves a lot of respect. Just try to make a game in Access! Actually I tried to make an interactive quiz in powerpoint last year, and it was horrible! I am not a VB expert but know my way around in several languages, and still this thing was a disaster, had a hard time trying to make one item loop (as a timer) and have another item interact with that loop (stop the timer). How come that in the end of the 80s there was a program that was more user-friendly than similar programs now? If you're unknown to Flash and you want to make a simple presentation, you're hit with a huge amount of complex menus. Just click, draw, and create a simple animation is next to impossible.
Hypercard was a revolutionary program. If it would've been cross-platform or web-integrateable it would probably be one of the most important programs used now. I guess its strength was in its limit, but that also meant the end of it for all practical purposes. Reading up on the other reactions here, I think the python-based version somebody suggested would be the most interesting. Free AND cross-platform!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I've heard the author of the site is a handsome, athletic, sex machine.
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