AppleWorks 6.2.9
They've got to be kidding...
Another dot release for what's got to be Apple's longest-running excuse for a productivity app in existence?
Where are the companions to Keynote and Filemaker?
Are they TRYING to force everyone over to the Office Student and Teachers Bundle?
A productivity suite is one of the most important apps on a modern computer.
How much longer can this insanity continue?
Another dot release for what's got to be Apple's longest-running excuse for a productivity app in existence?
Where are the companions to Keynote and Filemaker?
Are they TRYING to force everyone over to the Office Student and Teachers Bundle?
A productivity suite is one of the most important apps on a modern computer.
How much longer can this insanity continue?
Comments
Originally posted by Frank777
They've got to be kidding...
Another dot release for what's got to be Apple's longest-running excuse for a productivity app in existence?
Where are the companions to Keynote and Filemaker?
Are they TRYING to force everyone over to the Office Student and Teachers Bundle?
A productivity suite is one of the most important apps on a modern computer.
How much longer can this insanity continue?
I prefer Apple Works over M$ office. I own both and spend very little time using Office. However, you are correct, it is sorely in need of a major update. Hope it will come soon now that the focus is off of finishing Panther.
Originally posted by Frank777
Another dot release for what's got to be Apple's longest-running excuse for a productivity app in existence?
Where are the companions to Keynote and Filemaker? [snip]
A productivity suite is one of the most important apps on a modern computer.
How much longer can this insanity continue?
They're probably just fixing the things that they managed to break in 6.2.7, like that strange printing problem, and the instability of the import engine plug-in.
It doesn't necessarily preclude them from working internally on other projects, but really, we'll never know until the mythical/famed Document etc. are actually released. Keynote didn't stop them from working on AppleWorks 6.2.7; there's no real reason to believe that they'd kill support for AppleWorks even if they did release a new suite (its not really costing them anything to bundle it, and its certainly nice to get a more-or-less functional office suite for free).
And its not that bad anyway. Pity about the style management, and the retrograde UI, though.
(its not really costing them anything to bundle it, and its certainly nice to get a more-or-less functional office suite for free).
It'd be nice if Apple included it on ALL their computers.
AppleWorks is hanging around mostly for the educational market, where it has a huge legacy. (That's also one reason it ships by default on iThings). If Apple develops a suitable pro suite, or even if they find other people's apps that do as well (Nisus? Maybe before long... Mellel?) they can bundle those.
Office is going to be a hard app to knock down, and not only for technical reasons (although those are substantial as well).
However, we seem to be severely lacking in Spreadsheet options. If I'm not mistaken, Mariner is the only real third party app in this space, and it's a Carbon port of the MacOS 9 app (not that there's anything wrong with that...)
While the Mac has never been a preferred platform for accountants, even I - a DTP guy all the way - use a SS to keep track of bills, lists etc.
It's a wonder there are more options out there for us. Whatever happened to the NEXT software in this category? What about the Mesa product from MacOS 9 days? (I think that's what it was called...)
Originally posted by Frank777
It's a wonder there are more options out there for us. Whatever happened to the NEXT software in this category? What about the Mesa product from MacOS 9 days? (I think that's what it was called...)
Mesa for Mac OS X.
Disclaimer: Material expresed above may be biased.
It's just that you see reviews of Nisus and hear the buzz about Mellel, but I for one never heard a peep about Mesa. No reviews or ads in the Mac mags that I can recall. I'll look into it.
ryaxnb: By 'it' do you mean Mariner or Mesa? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with either.
If you mean AppleWorks 6.2, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that....
Originally posted by Frank777
They've got to be kidding...
Another dot release for what's got to be Apple's longest-running excuse for a productivity app in existence?
Where are the companions to Keynote and Filemaker?
Are they TRYING to force everyone over to the Office Student and Teachers Bundle?
A productivity suite is one of the most important apps on a modern computer.
How much longer can this insanity continue?
First I use and enjoy Appleworks. I wouldn't mind an revision as long as it keeps what makes it so enjoyable now.
Secondly exactly how much innovation is there left or is there necessary in the works type office suite area? This app is free, $30 or perhaps $80 if you have to pay full price. It does what it needs to well and better than any other app dollar for dollar.
Nick
It's only a matter of time...
Might I ask what this so-called "group" does? It's obvious that they haven't been hard at work. They haven't even added spell check on the fly functionality yet. I pray these people are gainfully employed doing something else rather than working in the "AppleWorks group" fulltime. I'd be embarrassed. I haven't seen anything they've done. No enhancements in years - well - the box has a new look to it.
I fully respect any software writers that choose to do things in a different way than Office has. Conformity is simply never a good policy. It seems to me that this AppleWorks Group needs to have their names and faces published for the world to see just to shame them into actually doing something. Perhaps have a running calendar of days, weeks, even years, in which absolutely nothing was done to make it better. I can understand R&D not exactly flooding the "group", but is AppleWorks the only software title Apple maintains as "currrent" in which they haven't lifted a finger to make it better?
At $79 dollars a pop for the software you'd think that Apple has long since paid off any R&D that went into it all those years ago. They ought to either make it free for ALL Mac's, or make it an app that can stand side by side with their other "current" apps with pride, not the title they keep around because of a so-called "legacy". They managed to make the box look new, so who knows. Perhaps one day they'll make AppleWorks have equal, if not greater, features like new software should.
Originally posted by Brian Green
IAt $79 dollars a pop for the software you'd think that Apple has long since paid off any R&D that went into it all those years ago. They ought to either make it free for ALL Mac's, or make it an app that can stand side by side with their other "current" apps with pride, not the title they keep around because of a so-called "legacy". They managed to make the box look new, so who knows. Perhaps one day they'll make AppleWorks have equal, if not greater, features like new software should.
I concur, but should also like to raise that older software titles--HyperCard, QuickTime Virtual Reality Studio, et alii--still are sold full-price on their web site. I'd like to know why...
sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but i could see a day when you could take a 20 page research paper, have the mac summarize the document, either down to the page or paragraph level, and generate a keynote presentation based on that info. then you could tweak the info to make sure it actually flows correctly and makes sense.
basically, like everything else apple is doing these days... take the apps you have, and make them work sensibly together.
it would make my wife's job a lot easier, for example, as she is constantly composing large papers to present for conferences, but dreads having to cull out all of the bullet points and then arrange them in a presentation.
What's wrong with AW is mostly the age of the codebase. It was great when it was ClarisWorks 3 and 4, and then AW 5 started the bloat (but it was still a good version), and AW 6 made the clumsiest effort at looking like an OS X app without actually acting like one. (All that said, I use it, and my mother uses it, and apart from occasional wonkiness it's a good workhorse.)
What is now AppleWorks was designed when it had to be a modular suite in a very small amount of memory. It was a marvel of efficient coding, and the developer came up with his own, extensive class library to build it. Fast forward to OS X, where all of a sudden the decisions that were elegant and ingenious in 1991 are an absolute nightmare to port, the original developers of the application are gone, and the remaining team, working hundreds of miles from the Mothership, has to extend this one-of-a-kind codebase and port it.
Apple rolled out point releases quickly enough when they were trying to polish it up to at least adequacy as an OS X app, so the development team has at least some familiarity with the details of the codebase. If they'd wanted to roll out AW 6.3 and 6.4, they probably could have. Given that they haven't, they must be at work on something else. And this is where we run into OS X itself.
The text engine in Jaguar isn't finished; many of the parts that are finished perform poorly. This is why the full-blown Nisus Writer hasn't come out. Nisus has been in close communication with Apple, and if the AppleWorks team - or some other team - has been attempting to reinvent the whole suite to leverage OS X, they've probably been swamping the OS X team with bug reports and feature requests. The current AW, which uses all the old text facilities (and many of its own) actually runs better than something built with OS X's native capabilities as of Jaguar. That changes in Panther, so after the release of Panther we should start seeing office apps appear from various vendors, not just Apple.
That explains the long, good-enough reign of AppleWorks 6, at least to me. Now that better is possible, better will come.
My wife likes to printer her own photos out. She likes to arrange them on the pager her way and add the captions they way she wants them. AW5 was good at this. AW6 was horrible at it. It would down sample the image and print poor resolution images. AW5 never did that. AW6 you couldn't get it to stop.
So we stopped using it and never looked back.
I still think AppleWorks ought to be a free App for everyone if they aren't going to give us something current. I'm happy for those people out there that use it and love it. I use it plenty myself, but I'd love to see what it COULD be. I have to be honest and say that Text Edit gets used a lot more than AW on my laptop when it comes to word processing.
I think the thing that upsets me the most is that if Apple is supposedly all big on education, why not put just one or two people toward their education software? We all know they have people on Quicktime, and people on iTunes, and all the other iApps. Why not work on AppleWorks? I have read plenty of the entries in regard to the Panther builds and updates in other strings, but of those I read, never once did I see someone write, "We've increased functionality of the text engine." It hasn't been mentioned that I've seen, though I know I haven't read every single entry. If Apple were really content with Microsoft offerings then they would use Windows Media Player rather than continually update Quicktime. Apple isn't happy with the Microsoft offering there, but it seems to me that Apple either is afraid of Office, or afraid that they can't do it better. Die hard Mac users, such as those on this forum, will be upset with such comments, but aside from being upset, where's the evidence? We have FileMaker Pro, and we have Keynote. Stand-alone apps. Nothing to challenge Office. I would be willing to bet that no one sees AppleWorks as a threat to Office, not even a little.
By all means, if you know something on this Amorph, please feel free to tell us about it. What's truly going on with this stuff? Are we to expect AW to die off because Steve quite simply could care less? What's up? Certainly someone has to know what's going on with AW and the before-mentioned text engine in Panther that Amorph was talking about. This is a big area of interest to a lot of people, you'd think it would be a slight priority with Apple.
Originally posted by Brian Green
Amorph, I hope for our sake that you are correct. I want a far better application and I'm not going to buy Office. I just won't do it. Hopefully you're right about Panther being better with the text engine. I'm not sure what that is, but of all things, I'd think a Mac wouldn't have trouble with text. It's hardly a new concept.
It's newer than you think it is, and a lot harder than you think it is.
There's classic "text," the old 7-bit ASCII standard, which is indeed dirt simple to support. But ASCII, as the 'A' specifies, is an American standard of little use outside the U.S.: It doesn't support accented characters, non-Roman alphabets, or even extensions to the Roman character set like the German schlosse. Then you have what's called 'Extended ASCII' or (incorrectly) '8-bit ASCII', which is actually a half-dozen or so mutually incompatible extensions, some of which are standard and some of which are not. Legacy being legacy, Apple has to support every one of them. Then 'wide character' support for languages that had more than 256 glyphs was sort of bolted on, but again, there are more standards than languages to support there, and for reasons I'll go into below, wide characters complicate everything. Finally, there's UNICODE.
At least with the various flavors of Extended ASCII you could assume that all characters were the same size, and one character fit in one byte (in fact, in the standards defining the C and C++ languages, 'character' and 'byte' are literally interchangeable). Whole languages and operating systems and network protocols and network services and application frameworks were built on this equivalence. Then wide characters appeared, for languages like Chinese and Japanese. Wide character support was bolted onto C (and hence, C++), but it had to be explicitly supported by the programmer - the language assumes to this day that a character is a byte, and then there are separate libraries to deal with these freaks called 'wide characters' if you need them. For the most part, all they do is assume that a character is two bytes, so it's still left up to the developer to figure out when and whether to use them, and what those two bytes mean.
UNICODE is a two byte (16 bit) character standard (although provision was recently made to expand it), but it has several different encodings. UTF-16 is raw UNICODE, and UTF-8 is UNICODE encoded into bytes, where one byte might be a complete ASCII character, or it might be the start of a multi-byte character. So at this point the old "1 character, 1 byte" equivalence is blown to Hell, and you have to do some real work just to figure out where a character begins and where it ends, according to which of dozens of possible and mutually incompatible encodings was used.
Then you have to display the stuff. ASCII's easy, because it only supports one language. Bring in other languages, and UNICODE, and watch the fun begin: Does the script read top down, or side to side? Left to right, or right to left? Is it like Kanji, where you type multiple letter-glyphs which are then distilled down to a single word-glyph? What happens when you're writing a comparative religion paper, quoting Torah in Hebrew (a right-to-left language) and a Buddhist monk in traditional Japanese (top-to-bottom)? How do you flow the text then? How does the cursor behave when you advance it through a Hebrew word in English text? What happens with text and paragraph formatting? Do you italicize Arabic? Speaking of Arabic (and Hebrew also), they break the Roman idea that every glyph is a separate character: There are only consonants in those languages, and what we know as vowels either float around or subtly modify the consonant glyph as pronunciation guides. So it's possible to type several characters in those languages without advancing the cursor. We are a long way from fixed-width ASCII characters indeed.
Apple had provided libraries and extensive documentation on to do handle all this, and they were very good, and they were still difficult and finicky enough to use that most applications were lukewarm about supporting them (Nisus made their name in large part by fully supporting them, and Mellel has a similar strategy). But they all assumed one Extended ASCII encoding (the Macintosh's non-standard encoding), which assumed that one character filled one byte. OS X supports the whole zoo of encodings, including UNICODE, and they support frameworks now. The first point means that the business of supporting text in general is vastly more complicated than it was in the '80s, and the second point means that Apple can no longer merely provide the capability, it also has to provide the implementation - so that you ask for a text field and you get one in the most general sense, and international text support "just works."
That should give you some idea of what's involved here.
I think the thing that upsets me the most is that if Apple is supposedly all big on education, why not put just one or two people toward their education software? We all know they have people on Quicktime, and people on iTunes, and all the other iApps. Why not work on AppleWorks?
It's a fact that they have a substantial team on AppleWorks - I think the last head count was 14. Now, combine that with the amount of work they've released on AppleWorks 6, and you have my line of speculation: They have to have been working hard on something else. Or else they've gotten really, really good at foosball.
I have read plenty of the entries in regard to the Panther builds and updates in other strings, but of those I read, never once did I see someone write, "We've increased functionality of the text engine."
Actually, that news did come out of WWDC. It's not something Apple will crow about, because it's not really a feature, and it's not something that most people understand - they, like you, believe that of course text should be supported. And so it should be. Nevertheless, you can bet there were developers doing handstands.
If these 14 programmers at the AppleWorks group have been working on something, lets take a stroll down amnesia lane and scope out some dates and see how their efforts stack up against their fellow programmers:
AppleWorks 6.2.7 = April 23rd, no significant changes.
Mac OS 10.2.6 = May 6th
iTunes 4.0.1 = May 27th
Quicktime 6.3 = June 3rd
iMovie 3.0.3 = June 3rd
Keynote 1.1 = June 4th
Final Cut Express 1.0.1 = June 9th
iPod Software Updater 2.0.1 = June 19th
Safari 1.0 = June 20th
iChat AV Beta = June 23rd
iDVD 3 Update 3.0.1 = July 14th
Mac OS 10.2.8 = October 3rd
iSync 1.2.1 = October 8th
iCal 1.5.1 = October 8th
That's before I got tired of writing down each one. The point is that Apple has no qualms updating all of it's other apps. These 14 people in the AppleWorks group just gave minor updates with 6.2.7. Nothing serious, and no "Hey I wanna buy it!" features. I couldn't find when AppleWorks was upgraded to 6.2.5 but my guess is it was a VERY LONG TIME ago.
The thing that really surprises me about all of this is that 6.2.9 is just a small bump in the road for 14 people working since April...even if they put in 1 hour work days.
I think the thing that gets me the most irritated about all of this is that people hear things about all the other Apple apps and it gives people a sign of hope for things to come. If these people in the AppleWorks group have been working so hard, why is there not a whisper to be said about it? Just a comment from Nick dePlume about rather underwhelming point increases. I can just see the people in the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft pointing and laughing.