Major Appleworks Upgrade?

[IJ Reilly]

Originally posted by hitman
question...

is appleworks written in carbon or cocoa?

Carbon. It doesn't implement sheets or services or any of the other niceties available to Cocoa applications. If Apple is trying to persuade developers to adopt the Cocoa development environment, why aren't they setting a good example?

FileMaker is Carbon, too.

 

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by MacSlut
AppleWorks should not be upgraded to directly compete with MS Office.
...
AppleWorks should be like iPhoto, iTunes, etc... wherein iPhoto is no PhotoShop, but to the person who can't afford/learn PhotoShop, iPhoto is like magic....and it can be positioned easily as uniquely Mac in all advertising.

Well, first, AppleWorks is currently available for both Mac and Windows, and only rarely in its history hasn't been. Of course, currently the Windows version is only available through Apple's education store, but it is there.

Second, I could easily see this upgrade, which has been so long in coming, being very significant. It could even make the dramatic step of splitting the product into two: iWork and Apple Office. And what about the possibility that both of these would be based on the Star Office code?

In general, I agree that MS Office compatibility in AppleWorks is fairly pathetic, and pretty much always has been. OpenOffice for OS X isn't even ready if you're using an XWindows implementation, let alone wishing for it to run with Aqua. Although I have many gripes about AppleWorks (bugginess, lack of flexibility, broken features under OS X, etc.), I still prefer it to MS Office (which I keep a copy of 98 around to run under classic when I need it).

Personally, I really hope that this is going to be a major upgrade to position AppleWorks (AppleOffice?) against MS Office with a very comparable (or even better) feature set.

 

[toranaga]

It's all about ".sdw"

Trying for MS Office compatibility is, in some ways, fighting yesterday's battle. As the business yutzes like to quote Gretsky, "Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is." As OpenOffice itself and, more importantly, its file formats ('.sdw' and others), become more common, we will want Appleworks to be compatible with them.

To not duplicate effort and continually reinvent the wheel, it is in the interest of all niche and small office application vendors to support a standard. Not to ape the Gorilla, but to choose a standard which they can contribute to and which won't change solely to encourage upgrades when new revenues are desired. Then, if this standard (right now OpenOffice's format is the top contender) has a module that can translate to/from MS Office formats, everyone who is compatible with OpenOffice (from Abiword, to Appleworks, to Okito, to Wordperfect, etc, is my hope), will then be compatible with MS Office 'for free' until that compatibility is no longer necessary.

 

[job]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly

That seems like a lot of extra pain for no gain. Why not just Save as... Word document in AppleWorks?

My teachers are not able to open the .doc files that I save with Appleworks...

I have no idea why...

 

[nickgold]

Try...

Originally posted by hitman


My teachers are not able to open the .doc files that I save with Appleworks...

I have no idea why...

Try adding .doc to the end of the filename, if you haven't already. I have found that often the Windows versions of Office spaz out when trying to open a file with no extension in the name.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly


Carbon. It doesn't implement sheets or services or any of the other niceties available to Cocoa applications. If Apple is trying to persuade developers to adopt the Cocoa development environment, why aren't they setting a good example?

FileMaker is Carbon, too.

It's simply because of the age of the current versoin of AppleWorks. I'm sure the next release will be fully developed in Cocoa.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly
Appleworks does "support" .doc (import and export), but like every other word processor I've ever used, it does so imperfectly. Why? Because Microsoft's file formats are proprietary -- they can be reverse-engineered, but not duplicated. Completely accurate translation of Office files is a pipe-dream, unfortunately. This is why so many of us own MS Office -- not because Office is the "standard," but because Microsoft is a monopoly.

We've paid our monopoly tax to Microsoft as well, but use Appleworks for all of our daily business -- it's just more manageable for most tasks. I hope Apple rewrites it from the ground up as a Cocoa app for the next release. I'd fork over for that, but not for just a couple of new features.

If you're correct about the .doc standard then why are there so many shareware programs that read .doc so perfectly. Also what about OpenOffice or ThinkFree Office. Aren't they based on MS Office code?

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by gregorypierce
Great! Its going from suck to blow

Seriously, unless you have very basic needs, Apple Works is all but useless. There are functions of it that don't even work on OSX - dialog boxes that won't respond to mouse clicks, funky drag and drop anomolies, etc. While I too would love to keep my Mac MSFT free, Office remains one of the only viable solutions for the Mac other than perhaps ThinkFree Office(which costs money strangely enough).

What version of OSX are you running? All the drag and drop problems and weird quirks with AppleWorks were fixed with 10.2.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by pimentoLoaf
There is a product -- MacLink Plus Deluxe -- that'll let you convert Windows-based documents to Mac.

This is the translation engine that AppleWorks uses and it is to say the least very faulty.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly


That seems like a lot of extra pain for no gain. Why not just Save as... Word document in AppleWorks?

Accuracy isn't very good, but it's no worse then it could be with any other word processor.

Actually your incorrect. ThinkFree Office is very exact and very compatible with MS Office where as AppleWorks is horrible.

I personally don't care about new features for AppleWorks. Just give us compatibility for MS Office. By the way compaitibility was number 1 on the list of changes of the upcoming AppleWorks.

The reason I want it is that schools are dominated by Office and I don't want to have to buy it use it at home just so I can do home work.

 

[arogge]

Re: It's all about ".sdw"

Originally posted by toranaga
Trying for MS Office compatibility is, in some ways, fighting yesterday's battle. As the business yutzes like to quote Gretsky, "Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is." As OpenOffice itself and, more importantly, its file formats ('.sdw' and others), become more common, we will want Appleworks to be compatible with them.

I am interested in AppleWorks being able to read the compressed XML file format standard that is used by OpenOffice.org. StarOffice compatibility prior to v.6.0 would be nice, but XML support is more important.

 

[iapple]

speed speed speed!!!

Now,

MS OFFICE V.X IS SLOOOOOOOOOOOW!

I mean really slow. NO question about it.
ANd it's aqua user interface seems sooo FAKE. The sheets are fake! SLOOOW to open tabs, to open options, and dreadfully slow when there are any graphics included in the text. The transparency doesn't print or get saved in pdf files either.



NOw, CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Apple can MAKE a word processor FASTER than Word, and SIMPLER, so that everyone can use it. I see no problem with it being compatible to Office, and it should be. If shareare programs can do it, so can Appleworks.

I just want speed.. Everything about Jaguar is great and fast, except Office v.X, ESPECIALLY Word. Excel is one of the better ones..

P.S. This is on a PB G4 667 with a clean install of Jaguar!

 

[evilfunkgenius]

Let's think politically here...

Unless Apple wants to destroy it's relationship with Micro$oft, it will continue to produce a sub-standard version of AppleWorks. End of discussion. People like brand names and like it or not, "Word" and "Office" are brand names. A lot of the time, they are a distinct reason why people feel so comfortable switching.

So we can sit around and whine about Apple needing to step up and make a Office replica because we don't want to support M$ but until the political issue is resolved, and unless Apple wants to isolate itself even more from it's powerhouse developers (which just might be the case, as noted by recent developments in Video, Audio and Searching technology purchases/advancements in recent months) then they will dummy-down their offerings and play nice with Micro$oft.

-efg

 

[MacSlut]

Originally posted by Snowy_River


Well, first, AppleWorks is currently available for both Mac and Windows, and only rarely in its history hasn't been. Of course, currently the Windows version is only available through Apple's education store, but it is there.

I must have missed the part where I said it wasn't available for Windows, or you must be seeing things.

Second, I could easily see this upgrade, which has been so long in coming, being very significant. It could even make the dramatic step of splitting the product into two: iWork and Apple Office. And what about the possibility that both of these would be based on the Star Office code?

The upgrade could be enormous, it could be based on Start Office code, but there's the reality that those of us who have to deal on a constant basis with others using MS Office will continue to use MS Office. Also, with the exception of the 2-3 people who ever purchased AppleWorks for Windows, the overwhelming majority of Windows users would never consider AppleWorks as a replacement for MS Office....even more justifiably so.

In general, I agree that MS Office compatibility in AppleWorks is fairly pathetic, and pretty much always has been.

And always will be. What some people don't get is that in a MS dominated office, compatibility at the document level is a black & white issue. The differences between MS Office Mac and Windows is already enough of a problem for some people. This isn't about making AppleWorks compatible with an open standard like HTML (which would be bad enough already), it's about making it compatible with a proprietary, yet thoroughly established standard.

Although I have many gripes about AppleWorks (bugginess, lack of flexibility, broken features under OS X, etc.), I still prefer it to MS Office (which I keep a copy of 98 around to run under classic when I need it).

I preferred ClarisWorks to MS Office from the beginning, but around the time Office 98 came out, Claris/AppleWorks was becoming bloated, buggy and ugly. When the Claris team jumped shipped over to MS and started evolving Office into more of a Mac-like app, it really showed.

Even without the compatibility issues, I'm not sure Apple or anyone else could produce a better Office for less on both Mac and Windows platforms.

Personally, I really hope that this is going to be a major upgrade to position AppleWorks (AppleOffice?) against MS Office with a very comparable (or even better) feature set.

So what is it that people like so much about AppleWorks? Certainly most people agree that it needs a major upgrade....needs to match MS Office, etc... It just doesn't make sense for Apple to invest so heavily into a product in order to compete with an established product. What's in it for Apple? There's the reality that fighting this battle would not be a success or result in profits. And in the end, it's hard to say that you'd end up with a better product than MS Office.

It makes much more sense for Apple as a SYSTEMS company to continue the mission of AppleWorks as a value-add for the Mac, and not to go into the business of competing with Microsoft for what some consider to be its real flagship if not cashest cow product.

 

[job]

Originally posted by MacBandit


It's simply because of the age of the current versoin of AppleWorks. I'm sure the next release will be fully developed in Cocoa.

Would a theoretical Cocoa version of Appleworks bring about any major speed increases?

 

[IJ Reilly]

Originally posted by MacBandit


Actually your incorrect. ThinkFree Office is very exact and very compatible with MS Office where as AppleWorks is horrible.

Ordinary formatting is usually not a problem. Try a Word document with tables and graphics and see how you do opening it with any non-Microsoft application. Try it with forms created in Word.

ThinkFree Office is too slow and buggy for my purposes, I don't like the non-standard interface, and I doubt it could do much better with complex Word documents.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by IJ Reilly


Ordinary formatting is usually not a problem. Try a Word document with tables and graphics and see how you do opening it with any non-Microsoft application. Try it with forms created in Word.

ThinkFree Office is too slow and buggy for my purposes, I don't like the non-standard interface, and I doubt it could do much better with complex Word documents.

I don't know about tables but I am referring especially to embeded graphics. AppleWorks doesn't know what to do with them and ThinkFree and several shareware apps do.

 

[chicagdan]

The one thing that would get me to absolutely abandon MS Office and move to AppleWorks would be if it surpassed PowerPoint. As a professional speechwriter, I'm stuck using piece of crap PP ... and would love to find an alternative product.

What's wrong with PP? Oh ... just about everything. Horrible, ugly internal graphics tools, no way to edit JPEG or other picture format files internally, awful support for movies within presenations, ackward text editing. Too many ways to do things (which is a real pain when multiple people make edits to a presentation and do things different ways.) And, worst of all, the overall style of the product, which encourages people to give robotic bullet-point driven presentations with no flair.

I cannot understand why a company like Adobe or Macromedia hasn't tried to make a superior multi-platform presentation product. I suppose because all office workers have PP on their desktops, they don't want to try to scale the mountain. But it is a truly horrible piece of software and the bane of my existence.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by chicagdan
The one thing that would get me to absolutely abandon MS Office and move to AppleWorks would be if it surpassed PowerPoint. As a professional speechwriter, I'm stuck using piece of crap PP ... and would love to find an alternative product.

What's wrong with PP? Oh ... just about everything. Horrible, ugly internal graphics tools, no way to edit JPEG or other picture format files internally, awful support for movies within presenations, ackward text editing. Too many ways to do things (which is a real pain when multiple people make edits to a presentation and do things different ways.) And, worst of all, the overall style of the product, which encourages people to give robotic bullet-point driven presentations with no flair.

I cannot understand why a company like Adobe or Macromedia hasn't tried to make a superior multi-platform presentation product. I suppose because all office workers have PP on their desktops, they don't want to try to scale the mountain. But it is a truly horrible piece of software and the bane of my existence.

Wow you really don't like PP do you? The bane of your existence!! Having choces isn't in itself a bad thing as long as all the results are the same. I'm not saying I have every used PP or that this statement is even about it. It just seemed like you wanted less choices which in my mind is a bad thing. Though keeping it simple is a good choice sometimes.

 

[chicagdan]

Here's why choice is a bad thing in Power Point. Person A creates 10 charts by manually creating boxes, then creating text with clear background to put inside them.

The charts then get passed to Person B who adds three charts, but this time doesn't draw manual boxes, but instead creates colored text boxes around the text (as it should be done ... but PP doesn't have a manual, so most people don't know this.)

Now Person C gets the charts and has to make edits ... and has to deal with two completely different formats, undoubtedly using different margin settings as well.

Choice is a wonderful thing if only one person is in control of a document from start to finish. But in the real world, we collaborate. And without customization, chaos ensues. PP is pure chaos, and yes, the bane of my existence.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by chicagdan
Here's why choice is a bad thing in Power Point. Person A creates 10 charts by manually creating boxes, then creating text with clear background to put inside them.

The charts then get passed to Person B who adds three charts, but this time doesn't draw manual boxes, but instead creates colored text boxes around the text (as it should be done ... but PP doesn't have a manual, so most people don't know this.)

Now Person C gets the charts and has to make edits ... and has to deal with two completely different formats, undoubtedly using different margin settings as well.

Choice is a wonderful thing if only one person is in control of a document from start to finish. But in the real world, we collaborate. And without customization, chaos ensues. PP is pure chaos, and yes, the bane of my existence.

As I said though if the end result were all the same it would make no difference. If they were all the same then they could all be edited the same and user C would never no that they were created differently.

 

[chicagdan]

No, the end results is definitely NOT the same, because if person C has to edit documents created in two different formats (and can't tell by looking at them that they were created in two different formats) it basically doubles his work. You have to work in PP every long excruciating day to understand what I'm talking about ... it's really, really stupid to have a program that requires you to edit documents in different ways based on how the document was created.

Take, for example, the complete dumbasses who use the spacebar to create text spacing instead of tabs. You can't tell that it has been done that way ... and it may look fine to the naked eye ... but it's a pain the ass to edit.

All MS products have the same problem. They just load on new feature after new feature, never paying attention to the overall usability of the product. The end result is a contraption similar to that car Homer Simpson designed for his brother. Homer may have gotten his brother fired in Detroit, but he would be welcomed with open arms in Redmond.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by chicagdan
No, the end results is definitely NOT the same, because if person C has to edit documents created in two different formats (and can't tell by looking at them that they were created in two different formats) it basically doubles his work. You have to work in PP every long excruciating day to understand what I'm talking about ... it's really, really stupid to have a program that requires you to edit documents in different ways based on how the document was created.

Take, for example, the complete dumbasses who use the spacebar to create text spacing instead of tabs. You can't tell that it has been done that way ... and it may look fine to the naked eye ... but it's a pain the ass to edit.

All MS products have the same problem. They just load on new feature after new feature, never paying attention to the overall usability of the product. The end result is a contraption similar to that car Homer Simpson designed for his brother. Homer may have gotten his brother fired in Detroit, but he would be welcomed with open arms in Redmond.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that in your example if the end result of the two were to get the exact same results in that they could be edited exactly the same it wouldn't make a difference.

Also at least in Word you can turn on text formatting and it will let you see how the file was created down to the spaces, paragraphs, tabs and everything.

I do see what your problem is but I have not once argued against your point about the problems with PP. I'm just simply saying that choice is a good thing if implemented correctly by the program so that it doesn't matter how you do as long as what you end up with is the exact same thing (in other words threre's only one way to edit it because the end result was the same).

 

[chicagdan]

I'm not really arguing with you, I'm lashing out against MS and PP in particular.

Yes, if the program was intuitive and treated the end product the same way so it could be edited the same way, it wouldn't matter how it was created. And I agree with you that a Word-like formatting screen would be helpful to PP.

But in the end, it's really just a crummy product that people accept because they have no other option. I'm sure everyone would love Kia automobiles if no other brands were produced (wow, it actually tells you what speed you are driving!) But we are fortunate to live in a world where we can compare the Kia to dozens of other car models that raise our expectations.

I would really like Apple to produce a modular office suite that starts out absolutely free, bundled with the OS. Then you can pay feature-by-feature for things you really need. That would allow the word processor to be customized (plug-in modules, for example, for specialized writing tasks would be great, along the lines of the wonderful Final Draft program for screenwriting.) It would also let you keep out garbage you never use. The modular pieces could be downloaded as needed, pay as you go.

I'd also like the next AppleWorks to have some simple webpage creation software built in. As much as I love Dreamweaver, I'm not prepared to fork over $400 for it and I don't need 70% of its features. Maybe Apple and Macromedia could get together on a Dreamweaver Lite that would give Mac users a low-cost alternative to FrontPage.

 

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by MacSlut


I must have missed the part where I said it wasn't available for Windows, or you must be seeing things.

Well, you said:

Apple should find ways to upgrade AppleWorks that give it useful and unique features that make Windows users ask "how did you do that?" and the answer is "Oh, it's really easy with AppleWorks, but you NEED A MAC."

Thus implying that AppleWorks is only available on a Mac.

The upgrade could be enormous, it could be based on Start Office code, but there's the reality that those of us who have to deal on a constant basis with others using MS Office will continue to use MS Office. Also, with the exception of the 2-3 people who ever purchased AppleWorks for Windows, the overwhelming majority of Windows users would never consider AppleWorks as a replacement for MS Office....even more justifiably so.

Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Even without the compatibility issues, I'm not sure Apple or anyone else could produce a better Office for less on both Mac and Windows platforms.

I think that there would be a number of people who would strongly disagree with you. Indeed, there are a number of computer companies that have stopped packaging MS Office on their computers, and instead have been packaging Corel's WordPerfect Suite. (And I've known many people that greatly prefer WordPerfect to MS Office.)

So what is it that people like so much about AppleWorks? Certainly most people agree that it needs a major upgrade....needs to match MS Office, etc... It just doesn't make sense for Apple to invest so heavily into a product in order to compete with an established product. What's in it for Apple? There's the reality that fighting this battle would not be a success or result in profits. And in the end, it's hard to say that you'd end up with a better product than MS Office.

It makes much more sense for Apple as a SYSTEMS company to continue the mission of AppleWorks as a value-add for the Mac, and not to go into the business of competing with Microsoft for what some consider to be its real flagship if not cashest cow product.

I think that there is one simple reason why Apple would want an office product to position against MS Office, and that is to loosen MS's choke hold on the Apple system. Currently MS can issue a powerful threat to completely drop support for Office on the Mac system. But if Apple had their own Office software that was "100%" compatible with MS Office, this would take a lot of the power out of that threat.