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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.
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 Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"
Moof!
Thud.
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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.
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
... there was a 21 MOOF!!! salute.
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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...
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.
Well, for Numbers, it's a "Yes, but...". There's a number of things which don't work.
hlookup and vlookup don't import, formulas using those will be replaced with the last calculated value. Anchors and bookmarks don't import.
There's some UI commands missing, too, like "Fill Down" or "Fill Right", which I used frequently.
It was interesting just how close ClarisWorks spreadsheets were to MaxiPlan; all I had to do to move over from the Amiga was re-bias dates to the different epoch. All the formulas worked.
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.
You should still be able to find Word Perfect 3.5e floating around. Corel released it for free, for awhile, and now the installers are still out there.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
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