Appleworks 6
 

I have used Appleworks since day one, and still use it often, But OS 10.6.8 doesn't like it. It works but is is extreemly slow, might there be a fix for it, rather than using MS Word?

First thing to try: delete all the aliases in

~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items

No aliases, what next?

In AppleWorks > Preferences > General:

Uncheck the "Font Menu in Actual Fonts" option

It was unchecked....

If you have an AW AutoSave folder at ~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/AutoSave, empty it, too.

Trash the AW plist at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.appleworks.plist

Use Disk Utility to repair permissions. (Probably won't make a difference, but running out of ideas.)

I can't recall whether duplicate fonts affect AW or not. To take duplicate fonts out of the equation, use Font Book to find and disable the duplicates.

If those approaches don't help, keep in mind that here remains a won't-let-go-till-they-pry-it-out-of-my-cold-dead-hands AppleWorks community in the Apple forums: https://discussions.apple.com/commun...ons/appleworks. You may want to pose your question there.

AppleWorks has been abandoned by Apple, and so I would suggest that you move all your documents to another app.

Rather than use Word, why not try Pages? It can read AppleWorks docs and is very cheap.

Did you see this?

Q...

That article is as dated as the above discussion.

For all it's perceived benefits, there are no valid reasons to keep using antiquated software. Time to move on.

I tried running the Classic version of AppleWorks 6 in Sheepshaver, and it works fine. (I had to update QuickTime from the OS system image I had; luckily Apple still has downloads for QT4 and CarbonLib, etc.)

Some of my AW files can't be opened by iWork. So it was good to get them open. However, there was still very little in the way of export ability for spreadsheets. The document files could be exported, but then I could read most of their contents with TextWrangler anyway.

In the end, I was able to establish that there's very little in my few remaining AppleWorks files that I need.

It was a nice little experiment in yesteryear. It makes you realise how far we've come. I couldn't even remember how to add a printer in the vain hope of PostScripting/PDFfing some of the files.

All trashed now.:p

I still use AppleWorks 6 even now (10.6.8, Rosetta firmly in place). But then I still have ways of opening MacWrite 4.6 documents ;)

I see no reason to let go of the past if I can bring it along with me!

You can only bring the past with you so far.

The archiving of digital data requires not only continual migration of data onto new hardware storage, but also maintenance of the relationship between the data and the software platform that runs it.

Sometimes that means emulating older environments, and sometimes that means converting your data into newer formats. Neither is free of disadvantage.

Rosetta was always a temporary patch. One day, your hardware may fail, and you'll need to get a new Mac that can't run 10.6. (Or the temptations of 10.9 may out-weigh the necessity of running AppleWorks.) You need to prepare for what you will do when AppleWorks won't (easily) run on new hardware.

"Data is eternal, but software and hardware are not."

My 2.8 cents:

ASCII / UTF text is going to be around for a very long time, thus is the preferred format for readable documents. Derivatives like __ML (provided they are blob-free) will be about as readable in the future as old books are today.

More complex file formats will last if they are open-source and have achieved critical mass. PDF, MP3 and JPEG are top of the list, it's going to be a very long time before any new system will not be able to read or at minimum import them.

Anything else will last a decade, tops. That includes the media it's written to. Since the turn of the century we have seen the disappearance of tape (cassette, 1/4 inch, video, data etc.), minidisc, floppies, PATA disk drives, film and some large niche products like zip disks. Optical media is on it's way out, and the recordable varieties are not archival. Note, however, that the Voyager record will last, unless it gets hit by something.

If you want it to last, keep migrating it to new media. If you want it to last without maintenance, print it on good quality paper (20lb copier bond from Costco does not qualify). If you want it to last beyond your lifetime print it on archival paper or (better) sacrifice a few goats and use parchment. Don't forget to load the printer with inorganic pigments, and good luck getting the drivers to choose between ochre, umber and sienna properly. B+W film is probably a simpler choice, until Kodak and Fuji call it quits.

I believe that Kodak is currently in bankruptcy, and have announced their intention to sell their photographic film division in an effort to get out of bankruptcy. I'm not aware of any purchaser yet, though.

Fuji continues to sell photographic film.

Trevor

For the time being.

The big electronics shops in Tokyo have repurposed their film coolers to printer ink. The logos are gone but you can clearly tell whose film used to be there. Rather like an old Safeways.

Still, if you want something to last centuries I'm betting that a combination of parchment and either T-max or Eterna will be readable in the next millenium. Until, of course, those products disappear. Then we're left with boxes of vacation slides from the 70's and 80's for the future to discover.

The iWork apps can open (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) can open any AppleWorks file created with version 6.x of AppleWorks. They don't seem to be able to open files created with much older versions of AW, but as long as you have a working version of AW somewhere, you can open/save them to get the files to a format the iWork can open.

The only things you can't bring across easily are AppleWorks databases. Nothing seems to open them directly. You need to export each database from AW first as a flatfile (ex., comma delimited), and then import into something else.

As far as slowness is concerned, for me it always had to do with the Recent Items folder. If you've tried all the other suggestions above, you may want to look at your FontBook, and if you've got lots of fonts activated, deactivate as many as you can live with.

All good points; but I have every Mac I ever owned (or, alternatively, a replacement model into which the original hard drive was transferred) with the exception of my first, the SE, and software that lets me remote into them from elsewhere as well. That's in addition to having most of those environments preserved in an emulation environment on current machine. So for just a little extra effort I can get to almost all of the past, including 400K floppies, non-32-bit compatible applications, 100 MB Zip disks, 200 MB SyQuest cartridges, other external SCSI devices, and some pretty archaic file formats. (SuperPaint documents! PackIT archives! Tango-powered web front ends for FileMaker 5 databases!)

I may eventually find it difficult to find replacements for this 10.6-capable machine but until then I've got the advantage of forward-compatibility via 10.7 and 10.8 environments running in Parallels, and presumably a 10.9 virtual environment soon to join them.

Still using Appleworks ...
 

...on a MacBook with 10.4. It is the only program that I can interchange text and pics with abandon, place them backwards , use tools to edit pics within a text document, etc. Then I send the file off to my iMac 10.8.
(*_*)

And what will you do when the processor goes Fzeet! and the replacement hardware wants 10.6 or better? No more PPC emulator -> no more 10.4 -> no more AppleWorks.

Plenty of programs do this, including Pages.

Apple (not there unique in that) has a long history of Application abandonment, at least for their paid Apps, which is not very intuitive. I am too tired to list them all. You can start Macs platform I suppose... The first I remember was there Word Procecssors Macwrite, Macwrite Pro? Clarisworks, Appleworks, Bento. I am sure there is more.

When one chooses a a program one hopes it is elegant and useful. An important feature though is its longevity so that the files can be read in the future.

There used to be dedicated conversion programs were popular and most Applications could read and write to a number of formats.

MS Word has a pretty powerful feature called read and file that successfully imports at least body text.

While were on a word processor kick my most beloved word processor was only partially developed by Apple and was developed for many years by an outside company. WriteNow. One of the most elegant and fast word processors of its day. Writeen in machine language.