Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Critique of AppleWorks

I'm putting this in the Lounge, because it's not A Question.

Those of you who have been following my long and painful trail can - if you are of the mean mien - have a good laugh, now.

(Background for those of you who are not bored into a coma yet) We used to do everything on ClarisWorks under OS9. I bought new kit (i.e., new Macs) (i.e., from eBay and Amazon). I had ~4 weeks of stress, buying and installing new kit. I finally "realised" we could continue, on new kit, with AppleWorks which looks just like ClarisWorks. Now we're all back at work. Here's my critique of AppleWorks for anyone who may be interested.

1. AppleWorks database > mailing labels SUCKS. Entire fields are missing. Fields do not move up/concatenate. Unusable. Moved entire customer database to FileMaker Pro. This was really bad news. One of the main reasons for buying an AW license was for the mailing labels function.

2. AppleWorks (hereinafter referred to as AW) has messed up all the tint panels - which appear on every page of our publication. Every single one has had to be changed.

3. AW is shite at fonts, too. Every single headline font has had to be changed.

4. AW highlight colour is black. Default Mac highlight colour is blue. AW can't see it.

5. AW does not support scrolling mice.

6. AW print-to-PDF leaves out all the apostrophes. You don't see this at your end, the receiving person you sent it to, sees it on their end.

7. So far, on an Intel Mac, AW has quit unexpectedly, twice. It has not done this (yet) on a PowerPC Mac. (We have two of each.)

8. Screen display is also shite. At 100% the copy looks terrible. Size up to 150% and all is as it should be. This is pretty-much intolerable in a busy office on deadline.

The way this is going, I can see our publication changing to Pages - which we have, and which I tested thoroughly a year ago. This is also bad news, of a sort. My boss has just spent an entire week changing fonts, just to please AW and get this issue out the door. He is a man of limited tolerance and temper. He thinks I can fix every thing.

Happy New Year Decade

AppleWorks uses the same highlight color as the rest of the system for me (OS X 10.5.8).

I'm surprised it still works at all.

And it still has a Support page.

Here is my particular AW rant (MFI forums: March 28, 2005), after which i ran out and purchased Pages the next day: "of text encoding, fonts, and apps"

[i still keep AW around for some old (as yet unconverted) stuff though, but anything new gets done in iWork.]

Not under Tiger it don't.

That is a VERY HANDY link, thankyou. Using it, I've turned off Fractional Character Widths and Font Smoothing, which may help.

9. AW don't support Macros any more. I had most of the entire row of Function keys programmed to do the financial work and database work. e.g., switch from Master layout to another specific layout, highlight record, copy, switch to invoice, paste record into address block, strip out tabs and replace with paragraph marks.

All that can still be done, but by hand, not by F key.

10. AW keeps crashing "unexpectedly". Updating the folios for next week's issue, it crashed FIVE times. Corrupt preference file, prob. because I made the button-bar hide early on in the work-time-frame.

This has to be the least robust program I have EVER encountered. <rolls eyes>

[aside]Today I tried to convert my boss (the one with the short temper who does not like changes to his routine) to Pages, instead of this poor sorry excuse for a DTP program. Since I am strangely averse to being shouted and sworn at, on we plod with AW until Mid-March, it seems. [/aside]

[aside2] more on planet Bensheim will doubtless follow idc [/aside2]

Indeed, after a while one starts to expect them.

Bensheim you might point out to your boss that the last Appleworks update, 6.2.9, was released six years ago in January 2004! In computer terms that places it on a par with the age of dinosaurs.

And emphasize "the last" -- as in: there will never be another.

Well, perhaps on par with the age of Australopithecus robustus. When I think of "age of dinosaurs" in computer terms, I tend to think more of, say, TRS-80 software or Commodore 64 software. The Altair computer probably maps roughly onto the development of the first boney fish, whereas the UNIVAC I might be the development of arthropods, the Colossus could be the first eukaryote, and the Difference Engine might be called the first prokaryote.

I stand corrected.

FYI, the original founders of StyleWare, which became Claris, which then became the AppleWorks team, are close friends of mine.

I can say without hesitation, and with information direct from the most reliable sources on the issue, AppleWorks is beyond dead. There was one dev in the Vancouver, WA satellite office still working on AppleWorks bugfixes and such, but he left years ago.

The entire development team is now focused on iWork. Basing your business' workflow on AppleWorks is an extremely poor idea. I know it may be familiar and comfortable, but using that reasoning would mean you ride a tricycle to work.

Time to move on.

Those were pretty cool days, circa System 7.x

I had (and very much liked) both ClarisWorks and Claris Organizer. Then it got chopped up and parts went to Palm, FileMaker and Apple, etc. Probably a move to financially benefit all concerned? I wonder -- if Claris had held together -- what the landscape would look like today.

Where's iWork 2010 then?
Is that what the upcoming January 26 announcement will contain... along with iTablet (or something)?

Don't know, and frankly, don't care.

iWork, by default, saves to proprietary formats, which are also bad for business. If people are still using AppleWorks, it's probably because they have a ton of legacy work saved in proprietary formats that only AppleWorks can open. This kind of lock-in is like holding your data hostage.

OpenOffice (or other Free options) are a better bet. ODF is an open, published standard, and anyone, anywhere, anytime can implement them without reverse engineering.

Joe, he's not interested in facts like that. If something works well, why change it, is his POV.

To then riposte that in that case we'd all still be on typewriters cuts no ice whatsoever.

I have also pointed out that generally-speaking IT development moves on in small steps and everyone else keeps up with these small steps. In this office however, intervening small steps are not invoked and hence, mountain-sized big steps have to be undertaken and those with a great degree of resistance. For instance, the migration from OS9. Everyone else did it years ago, at that time. This office did not. It has now, with attendant grief on one person's part - his.

I'm always up for suggestions and spent about 2-3 hours today investigating OpenOffice without downloading it. There are many tutorials to look at on the net.

I'm not going down that route. Why? Because it would mean re-inventing the wheel, again.

The customer database and mailing labels (vital to our business) have been successfully migrated to FileMaker Pro. I already do the financials with Numbers, the very occasional letter with Pages. The actual publication will be transferred to Pages in March - the next break in publication dates.

I've already done trial issues using Pages, which took days, not hours. Re-doing trial issues with yet another software package would mean the third time in three years.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

NB: when I joined this company they were using some completely unknown to me package called Lasermaker (I think, it was a long time ago), which only worked on PCs, was command-line driven, had no icons or pull-down menus. The screens were black with green characters, there was no networking. The first thing I did was to get rid of all that and instal Apple Macs. The entire customer database had to be re-typed in by hand, of course. Anyway........enough of reminiscing. Onwards!

I commend your perseverance in the face of such adversity, as I'm sure you appreciate the inescapable consequence of your current software 'choices': assuming your company survives them, sooner or later you or your successor will have to re-type that entire customer database again, after having been forced to reinvent the company's software wheels, probably on the heels of ultimately unavoidable hardware changes. While this may constitute some degree of job security, it's of a kind I personally wouldn't care about all that much.