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I love APPLEWORKS, but dread the day that it will no longer be usable with future OS upgrades. I have started a string in the Apple forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11804769#11804769
and would like to know what you people think.
Thanks. (*_*)

I moved from AppleWorks (having migrated from ClarisWorks) in 2008 to Office for Mac 2004. (I had a spare license code after two from the education edition had been used on other machines.) I didn't want to, but the timing was right. (I bought a new Mac.) The "SaveAs" process took a few hours a day for several days to get them saved in Word/Excel format so that I could continue to edit them.

AppleWorks was/is better than O4M 2004, no question about it.

As I said on your thread, you might like to clone your current OS to an external hard drive and use AW from there as long as the drive lasts or Apple abandons Intel (IMHO). This way, you do not depend on any future upgrades. Just keep a dmg of 10.6.4 on that disk as well just in case.
You may need only a small and cheap drive for this; just make sure it has Firewire for speed and ease of cloning. OWC makes great drives powered directly by your computer. I assume you would already have something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

It was simply not financially viable for Apple to continue support for an application suite that was deprecated, what seven years ago, and finally obsoleted (support completely dropped) five or so years ago. Although there are still users who cling to Appleworks, the iWork suite has evolved into a far more feature rich and sophisticated set of apps that are written using a programming language and object oriented techniques that make its development and support costs a fraction of what it would take to continue AW. Like OS9 and the OS versions before that, the code base had gone about as far as it could go without a total rewrite from a clean sheet of paper -- ie. iWork.

IMHO it is past time to move on to newer more modern applications rather than risk that someday all your data being lost because a drive crashes and you lose all your last copy of AW or an OS version it will run on. The iWork applications can still read word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation files from the last versions of Appleworks, but I would not count on that continuing in the future.

there are a LOT of people still using Appleworks 6.2.1. It'll probably take the dropping of Rosetta (in 10.7?) to kill it off for good.

Agreed, and I am confident that Rosetta is on life support already so 10.7 (or if the rumors trun out to be true, iOS 5 Desktop, would seem to be a reasonable cutoff.

I am confident that Rosetta is on life support already

seeing as it's NOT installed by default in 10.6, I'd have to agree

Even though it is "not financially viable" and "is past time to move on" I can still pine over the simplicity of the AW suite. At the age of 80 (yes, when I first worked with programs, I had to linotype cards ) I find that programs are becoming more complex for more complex duties that I (and others) do not need, and at the same time are vulnerable for more errors. I have decided to buy a second-hand Mac with OS 10.6, install Appleworks and use this computer when I need to be creative. Of course, I will still work at understanding my iWorks suite, but it won't be as much fun. (*_*)

Whoops! Keypunch cards not linotype. (*_*)

Hi, joyss
I am transitioning from AppleWorks to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote myself. I, and others, would be glad to respond to any questions you might post in the Mac OS X Applications forum to help out as we are able.

If you go to the Help Menu while in Pages, you will Video Tutorials. I have found them very helpful for getting started.

Thanks!

Joyss I am not that many years behind you and I remember programming on punch cards using an octal machine code and having to warm the computer up for an hour before it could be used. Like you I find "feature creep" in many applications create unnecessary complexity, and try as I might although I love Keynote and find Numbers useful, I am still trying to learn to like Pages.

However, if you are looking for an easy to use, very straightforward, easy to use, and relatively powerful word processing replacement for AppleWorks, you might take a look at Nisus Writer Pro or Nisus Writer Express. Unfortunately, neither will read your AW files, but you need to be converting those to a more universal format anyway. Even your second-hand Mac is not going to last forever and based on your input so far I suspect you may very well outlast it.

Whew! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

ryck

Joyss I am not that many years behind you

we won't start taking you seriously until you've been involved with 'debugging' that involved checking the relays for dead moths.

I don't go back quite that far, but Grace Hopper told me that story was a fabrication anyway.

somewhere I have a copy of the scanned picture of a notebook page with a moth taped to the page, with a handwritten comment describing finding the "bug" in one of the relays after some amount of searching for unexpected program behavior, the moth's wing was trapped between contacts, insulating the connection and causing a program malfunction. The relays were high enough voltage to have killed the moth when it found its way into the spot. (we're talking vacuum tube voltages here)

I've seen the same picture, but Grace Hopper has denied the veracity of the report on more than one occasion. I wasn't there so I cannot comment on what the truth is.

I can't find it at the moment, but somewhere here I have a picture taken by an inspection unit on a motherboard production line, where the camera is taking pics of the boards to make sure all the components have been glued down properly in preparation for wave soldering.

The line rejected a board. On inspection, one of the resistors has a mosquito pinned to the board. The picture is an excellent closeup of the board with the mosquito pinned down by a wing iirc.

I would bet that clean room was somewhere in the orient or southern hemisphere.

yes it does make one wonder what a mosquito is doing in a clean room. Should be a tad bit above the micron limit of the air filters you'd think?

This isn't it,

http://www.martinmicroscope.com/images/MMGallery/F828CircuitBoard-MZ125-500x375.jpg

but that's exactly the sort of closeup on the board it was, but with no solder on the components yet, and a skeeter with one wing under one of the parts.

really annoys me that I can't find the pic.