You young whippersnappers who use
OpenOffice today (or even
Office 2007 if you're so blessed) never knew the simpler pleasur
es and wonders of Appleworks, Apple's original office producti
vity suite of apps. It had/has a word processor, spreadsheet and database progr
am all rolled into one, and more stuff like painting and drawing apps were adde
d on in later incarnations.
Appleworks used to come with older Macs and other Apple computers (yes, young V
irginia, there were Apple computers outside of Macs before - like the A
pple II, GS, Lisa and one or two others) as part of the software bundl
e, or sold separately. At one point it lived life as Clarisworks, but it's still on some store shelves today.
I did a lot of my early work in the mid-80s on the first versions of Appleworks
on my Apple II before moving to heftier word processors like WordPerfe
ct. Despite being a Swiss Army Knife of apps, Appleworks wasn't except
ionally good at any of its component apps, but Apple veterans cut their teeth o
n this office suite.
Appleworks has been ubiquitous, lurking faithfully in the background while we a
ll turned to other, more capable (and expensive) software, but in a pinch it wa
s always there to save the day. Mostly forgotten, it lasted up until Version 6
for OS X, but now, with the release of iWork
'08, Apple seems to be retiring the venerable old suite for good.
Apple isn't selling it anymore (although support still exists - you can get the
latest update
here), but the final nail in the coffin has been hammered in: go to the App
leworks portion of Apple's website, and it takes you to the iWork page.
To be sure, all its functions are already in iWork, now that the Excel<
/strong>-like spreadsheet app Numbers has been added to the mi
x, and there is no longer any reason to have the old fogey Appleworks hanging a
round. Sigh.
With this, Mac-A-Doodle officially joins the call to pressure
Apple to turn Appleworks into FOSS, so that people can continue to support and
develop it, and give Mac users a free alternative to the buggy and bloated Open
Office. Least we can do.
My sweet little iBook G4 came with AppleWorks, and I loved it from the start.
In fact, I use it for most of my personal files, and the little writing drabble
s that are my guilty pleasure.
I keep NeoOffice for the larger documents and working on those Microsoft files
people send me for editing or additional input.
Thing is, since Apple units are built to last, it's going to be quite a while b
efore I'll need to upgrade to iWork...::grin::