AppleWorks Replacement

"...iLife and iWork are being developed and perfected Asian Warrior Style."

Yes, those guys did a lot of software development. : )

(Seriously, the point is that perfecting things is by no means – not even remotely – the domain of some certain ethnicity/nationality/regionality/gender/creed/martial bent/etc. etc. The software industry is a perfect example of that!)

Re DataViz: Good point, what about more complex docs with embedded parts? I too doubt things will work too well. I've imported some really simple AW docs into iWork; I did have one doc that wouldn't import, but that was a very complex page layout (AW could be forced to do some pretty serious layout work!) so I wasn't too surprised.

Seeing other reports here about various troubles with doc importing, I'll have to agree that it would have been nice to see Apple put more work into iWork as an upgrade path for existing AW users.

Of course, the other big disappointment with iWork (besides its c-r-a-w-l-i-n-g speed on my G4 PB) is its lack of some AW features. Pages is a great tool that kicks Word into the gutter, Numbers is quite raw but has promise, and Keynote makes PowerPoint look so bad it's not even funny. But drawing tools are still really simple, there's no database component, there's no painting component (not a big loss), and, of course, it's not all bundled together into one speedy, tidy app like AW.

I like iWork a lot, but I can understand that it's not an ideal AW replacement for everyone. : (

>Meanwhile, so long as your data is readily movable between AW and Bento

That is not a safe assumption and does not at all appear to be um, possible.

Anyone had any luck moving an AW database into Bento?

Greg Sigman

Appleworks still works fine for me under 10.5.2 on an Intel Mac, and its documents are still indexed by Spotlight so there's no pressing reason to change. The only major feature to be lost was macros with the transition to OS X.

I've been trying not to use it for new documents, but it can be frustrating when the iWork applications don't have the same feature set and it feels like you're back on the steep part of the learning curve instead of using an application you're familiar with. For simple letters with a few embedded images I've found Textedit to be the easiest option.

What I have found impossible to replace is my routine use of Appleworks as a text-outliner with in-line vector graphics (of chemical structures) and mathematical formulae. Any suggestions are welcome.

But will Bento import the AW database? That is the question. I've got a rather substantial database of plants, and would like to 'move it forward' if I could.

Transferring databases to Bento is a multi-step process. Appleworks will export data to a tab-delimited text file. The text file can be opened in the Appleworks word processor (or your text-munger of choice) and a series of search-replaces done to make it a valid CSV file which Bento will import reasonably intelligently. I have transferred thousands of case-records for anaesthetics (including pop-up lists and check boxes) this way but it took a few tries to get right.

On Mar 27, 2008, at 1:33 AM, Gregory Sigman wrote:

> That is not a safe assumption and does not at all appear to be um,
> possible.
>
> Anyone had any luck moving an AW database into Bento?

See the post from AlfAardvark at the bottom of this page:
http://forums.filemaker.com/fmbnto/board/message?
board.id=GS&thread.id=763&view=by_date_ascending&page=2


Randy B. Singer • Mac OS X Routine Maintenance • http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

On Mar 28, 2008, at 1:56 AM, Randy B. Singer wrote:

>> Anyone had any luck moving an AW database into Bento?
>
> See the post from AlfAardvark at the bottom of this page:
> http://forums.filemaker.com/fmbnto/board/message?
> board.id=GS&thread.id=763&view=by_date_ascending&page=2

Just to head off all the folks who won't be able to get that URL to
work for one reason or another, instead try:

http://oozeb.notlong.com

Randy B. Singer • Mac OS X Routine Maintenance • http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

>If It's Not Broken, Then Don't Fix It.

When did you last change the oil in your car? You did? Really? Why, what
was broken?

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

On Mar 30, 2008, at 7:12 AM, Edward Reid wrote:

>
>> If It's Not Broken, Then Don't Fix It.
>
> When did you last change the oil in your car? You did? Really? Why,
> what was broken?

That's preventative maint., and that prevents the need to have to be
concerned about doing any fixing, in the immediate future. And btw -
there was nothing broken, but that 3750 miles checks between changes -
I drive a Toyota- would also give me the opportunity to have my techie
see if there is anything that needs to be fixed. The same would apply
to yearly physicals, catch it while you can.

The above represents New England wisdom, at its basic/highest level.

Bob

On Mar 30, 2008, at 4:12 AM, Edward Reid wrote:
>
>> If It's Not Broken, Then Don't Fix It.
>
> When did you last change the oil in your car? You did? Really? Why,
> what
> was broken?

The oil was broken. Or breaking (or, if one listens to the oil
vendors for intervals, would have broken sometime).

I'll change the question to timing belt/chain (for those who keep cars
that long).

One could have used an AppleWorks DB to record this stuff (now one
could use Bento--or a sheet of paper).

   --John (whose timing belt was just changed at 70% of recommendation
because of water pump failure)

On 3/30/08 7:12 AM, "Edward Reid" <edwardpaleo.org> wrote:

> When did you last change the oil in your car? You did? Really? Why, what
> was broken?

The oil's capacity to lubricate becomes seriously compromised with time and
usage. It is no longer capable of fulfilling its function; ergo, it is
broken and requires replacement. Appleworks has not reached that point.

I think it's fair to say that we all understand the necessity of preventive
auto maintenance.

I think I can also sum up why those of us who are being a little grumpy
about Apple's desertion of Appleworks feel the way we do. Appleworks was a
very versatile product. There is no single piece of software which can
replace Appleworks, which means you end up paying far more than the cost of
Appleworks just to try and replicate the functionality of this single,
flexible suite. Furthermore, there is no easy, one-step way to migrate
complex Appleworks documents of any kind to a newer product (text-only word
processing documents are easy, as are spreadsheets without graphs). This
means a financial investment and a non-trivial amount of work for those of
us with a significant number of complex documents, particularly databases.

Does that sum it up? Is there anything else to cover?

Many thanks to those posters who offered practical suggestions for my
databases; it is good to know that there is a way to migrate that doesn't
involve retyping all of the data at least, even if all of the layouts are
lost. For now, I'm sticking with Appleworks on the off-chance that the next
version of Bento will include a more direct means to import. Perhaps a
misplaced hope, yeah, but for now, well, "if it ain't broke..."

Greg Sigman

At 12:52 PM -0700 3/30/08, Gregory Sigman wrote:
>I think I can also sum up why those of us who are being a little grumpy
>about Apple's desertion of Appleworks feel the way we do. Appleworks was a
>very versatile product. There is no single piece of software which can
>replace Appleworks, which means you end up paying far more than the cost of
>Appleworks just to try and replicate the functionality of this single,
>flexible suite. Furthermore, there is no easy, one-step way to migrate
>complex Appleworks documents of any kind to a newer product (text-only word
>processing documents are easy, as are spreadsheets without graphs). This
>means a financial investment and a non-trivial amount of work for those of
>us with a significant number of complex documents, particularly databases.
>
>Does that sum it up? Is there anything else to cover?

Great summary.

One more feeling -- Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

Apple is waving these pitiful replacements for AppleWorks at us,
expecting us to be h$a$p$p$y as we bleed while converting. But then
what? Will Apple hiccup and terminate the products? Or short us on
features in upcoming releases? Some of us still remember CyberDog,
the fast/useful Finder, AW 6's missing translators and modules, etc.
And now we're more than a bit gun shy...

- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth

Ed,

I do not think this is a correct analogy: putting oil in your car (for mechanical moving parts) is *very* different from changing software (it consists in modifying a program, which is a purely conceptual/cerebral object). Yeah, I know both are called "maintenance" by a very tenuous and hazarduous 'slippage of sense', so current in geek-speak that spread to general public.

Greetings to Melynda. Cheers

On 03/31/2008 05:16 AM, "Dan" <dantearmokgmail.com> wrote:

> Apple is waving these pitiful replacements for AppleWorks at us,
> expecting us to be h$a$p$p$y as we bleed while converting. But then
> what? Will Apple hiccup and terminate the products? Or short us on
> features in upcoming releases? Some of us still remember CyberDog,
> the fast/useful Finder, AW 6's missing translators and modules, etc.
> And now we're more than a bit gun shy...

Um...while it doesn't have a database, and I really don't use a spreadsheet
enough to care, there's no way you can call Pages and Keynote "Pitiful"
replacements for the similar modules in AppleWorks.

--
John C. Welch

On Mar 31, at 6:16 AM, Dan wrote:

> Apple is waving these pitiful replacements for AppleWorks at us,
> expecting us to be h$a$p$p$y as we bleed while converting. But then
> what? Will Apple hiccup and terminate the products? Or short us on
> features in upcoming releases? Some of us still remember CyberDog,
> the fast/useful Finder, AW 6's missing translators and modules, etc.
> And now we're more than a bit gun shy...

This is a good reason to get behind standardization and adoption of
something like the OpenDocument file format [1]. I've quite happily
been using ODF-based NeoOffice [2] on my Macs and Open Office
everywhere else -- meaning really Linux -- for quite a while now. Most
of my word processing and presentations are LaTeX-based, but I've got
some pretty impressive spreadsheets and databases managed by Neo/Open-
Office.

[1] <http://xml.openoffice.org/>
[2] <http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php>

At 2008-03-30 12:52 -0700 Gregory Sigman wrote:

>I think I can also sum up why those of us who are being a little grumpy
>about Apple's desertion of Appleworks feel the way we do

Greg - I can add just one more aspect that's even more infuriating.

I was a very enthusiastic user of Resolve (the Claris spreadsheet)
which was really nice to use and had powerful scripting capabilities.
Then Claris decided to discontinue it, and, as a sop to those who
felt unhappy about that decision, offered a copy of ClarisWorks (as
AppleWorks was known in that epoch) either free or very cheap. I'd
never used it before, so took up the offer. As it turned out, the
spreadsheet in ClarisWorks was a broken toy in comparison to Resolve,
so I never really used it much, (nor the database as I'm a FileMaker
user from the Nashoba days) but I did do some actual work with the
word-processor.

So, the only reason I have legacy AppleWorks files to convert is
because of a previous decision by Apple to discontinue a "perfectly
good working product"!

>Many thanks to those posters who offered practical suggestions for my
>databases; it is good to know that there is a way to migrate that doesn't
>involve retyping all of the data at least, even if all of the layouts are
>lost

I've found that sometimes just taking a screenshot of a FileMaker
layout is enough to help re-construct a layout that can't otherwise
be transferred (don't ask about the gory details!). If you wind down
the contrast and wind up the brightness using GraphicConverter it
becomes rather "ghostly" and you can then paste it into the new
layout and re-construct over it, finally deleting the pasted picture
when done.

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/

I have a ton of AppleWorks files which I've decided I'd better convert to iWork. Any suggestions on how I can batch convert them?

Thanks!

At 12:52 03/30/08 -0700, Gregory Sigman wrote:
>The oil's capacity to lubricate becomes seriously compromised with time and
>usage. It is no longer capable of fulfilling its function; ergo, it is
>broken and requires replacement. Appleworks has not reached that point.

Spoken like a non-programmer.

Others have already elaborated on why Apple most likely (I don't think
anyone here actually has inside knowledge of the code) could not reasonably
continue moving the existing code base forward. Programmers cannot just let
working code sit there and expect it to continue working, because most code
exists in a moving world. Hey, if your systems are working well and do not
interact in any way with the outside world, you have a good supply of spare
parts, and you don't need or expect increased functionality, then leave
well enough alone -- don't "fix" it.

But the fact that you are having (or realistically anticipating) these
problems says that you did, or plan to, try to "fix" it (or do preventive
maintenance if you prefer that term, though since you agree that the oil in
a car needs replacing because it "breaks", I disagree with the
distinction). Why aren't you still running the systems that include a
functional Appleworks, and planning to continue running them indefinitely?
Probably because, like the rest of us, you live and work as part of a
changing world. You, like the rest of us, fixed your setup by upgrading,
which unfortunately is leading to other problems.

I don't for one minute defend this system, which has to keep moving faster
and keep everyone within it buying and buying to keep the world economy
from collapsing. It's a system which values change over a base of knowledge
and developed products (including code); it's a system which ignores
history, and I don't trust it. I also certainly do not defend Apple in its
failure to provide a path forward. But saying Appleworks "wasn't broken" is
EXACTLY like saying I don't need to change the oil in my car because my car
is running just fine. You have knowledge of the internals of the car which
leads to the advice to change the oil. Programmers have knowledge of the
code, which most users never see, which sometimes leads to overhauls rather
than tweaks.

>I think it's fair to say that we all understand the necessity of preventive
>auto maintenance.

You've pretty much restated my point. We all understanding the necessity of
preventive auto maintenance. (Well, I didn't understand it nearly as well
when I was young.) Program code, in a moving world, does reach the point
that it needs the equivalent of preventive auto maintenance. It needs to be
fixed before the users see that it's broken.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

As mentioned above, do check out the format-conversion tool DataViz MacLinkPlus http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/ . It usually continues to support very old formats, which makes it great for opening files you forgot to convert when switching major apps. I don't know if/how it handles databases.

Rowland Carson wrote:
> So, the only reason I have legacy AppleWorks files to convert is
> because of a previous decision by Apple to discontinue a "perfectly
> good working product"!

A "perfectly good working product" to you may be in such a development state (due to perfectly reasonable development choices made years earlier) that further development costs will earn back only 1/2 or less of each dollar spent. If you owned such a product what would you do other than make it a philanthropic pursuit?

David Ross

I just read the following article:

<http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/04/16/ibm-launches-pilot-program-for-migrating-to-macs/#more-1752>

which drew my attention because of this sentence:

"IBM’s software strategy is also embracing the Mac platform, with a new version of Lotus Notes and an integrated package of office productivity software based on OpenOffice and branded as Lotus Symphony being slated for release for the Mac later this year."

This sounds hopeful, though I've not used anything Lotus in decades but really want something decent in order to migrate all my AW docs. Any comments or other info on this?

Thanks, Patricia :)

I used Lotus 1-2-3 for Mac. Is there an update? Is there a way to port it to Mac OS x 10.4.1.1? It was much easier to use than Excel.