No wonder they had to retire AppleWorks

This month’s formal retirement of AppleWorks 6 was a long, long, long time in coming. In my opinion it was one of the best apps ever created in the OS 9 era, although there were a couple of false starts before they nailed it in version 6.2. But Apple never did properly update AppleWorks for MacOS X. It worked okay, but its interface lacked basic such basic OS X tenets as proper save dialog boxes, leaving AppleWorks feeling like a Classic app which just happened to sport an OS X Kaleidoscope theme (you’ve been around for awhile if you can spot that reference). And on the newer and faster Macs, AppleWorks can ironically run mercilessly slow.

Although I’ve gradually pared down my AppleWorks usage to the point where I only launch it when relying on a handful of templates which I’ve never bothered to recreate in a more modern app. I have AppleWorks open a few times a month at most, and never for more than a few minutes. But that having been said, I have yet to find a proper replacement.

Despite having the latest version I don’t use MS Word ever, not even when exchanging Word documents. It’s not that I’m protesting against anyone or anything, it’s just that Word happens to be the single most unusable piece of software ever created. It’s not that I can’t use it or don’t know how to use it, it’s that I’d rather pull my own teeth than spend time wrestling with that pig. What a phenomenal waste of money that pig was. And no, I have no interest in any of the open-source Word clones, either. It’s not Microsoft’s disgustingness that keeps me from using Word; it’s the disgustingness of Word that keeps me from using Word.

Lest ye think I’m merely picking on Microsoft here, Apple’s Pages has never come close to being a replacement for AppleWorks either. I love what Pages can do as a page layout program, and I’ve used it on a few projects to that end with really cool results, but as of its first two versions (both of which I shelled out for), Pages was simply not a word processor. I’ve been told by people I trust that the latest version actually has a “word processor” mode that allows you to, you know, process words, and that’ll be great to explore when I find the time to go grab the latest iWork.

So what do I use to process words? I should preface this answer. Nearly everything I write is for the web, which means that it’s all going out there in plaintext with bits of hand-coded html here and there anyway. So there’s no need for fancy formatting, and in fact the lack of any attempted auto-formatting is a plus when it comes to cutting and pasting the html. So for the past couple of years, my word processor of choice (er, default necessity I suppose) has been TextEdit.

Hey, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re largely in the same situation I am. It works for me and my workflow. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. I’ve been too busy lately to even consider breaking in a new word processor and seeing if it fits my workflow, but when the time is right (read: soon) I’ll give Pages ’08 a try. So no need to write in and try to convince me to rush out to the store; I’m with you. And please, don’t even waste your time trying to convince me of anything related to Word. Yes I’m using the latest version, yes I’ve spent plenty of time with it, yes it sucks even more than the previous version, and no I’m not shelling out for the next version.

I’ve been kicking around all of these thoughts since I read of AppleWorks’ demise. But none of the above is what motivated me to actually commit my thoughts to words today. Instead, it was the fact that this morning was one of those rare instances in which I was compelled to use AppleWorks. And if I hadn’t just happened to flip over to list view in the Finder, I never would have spotted it. But as I glanced at the listings for the AppleWorks document I had just updated, and the PDF file I had created of that document, something stunned me:

The AppleWorks document itself, annotated by the old-school “.cwk” suffix? Forty-four kilobytes. The PDF of said AppleWorks document? One hundred and eight kilobytes. That’s right, the AppleWorks file format is so antiquated that even a simple PDF with no user-editable data ends up being twice as large of a file.

And that, my friends, is the real reason why Apple finally had to retire AppleWorks – symbolically, of course. The file size thing merely goes to demonstrate just how ancient AppleWorks 6 really is. If Apple had kept up development, we’d be looking at, what, AppleWorks 11 by now? And maybe Pages ’08 will be AppleWorks 11. I’m open to that possibility; I just know that Pages ’06 wasn’t. And in any case, in an era where AppleWorks would need to be at version 11 in order to fit in with modern computing, trying to do much of anything with version 6 is just asking for it.

You either know why or you don’t. When I worked in the school system we were relying on a district-wide email system which had been discontinued seven years earlier. I had a heck of a time trying to make the educators understand why that simple fact alone was enough to mandate that we move to some other mail system. You don’t use software that old on a new computer and expect good things to come of it. I also had difficulty preparing them for the fact that the transition to any new email system was going to be painful, specifically because of the fact that we were used to something that was so many versions behind, so distinctly from another era.

You don’t leap five versions overnight without some bumps and bruises during the transition. And that’s where Apple went wrong by allowing AppleWorks to wither long before they even began to think of carrying forward with it in a different manner, and even after they realized they needed to, it took them far to long to figure out that their modern alternative was no more suitable of a replacement than Microsoft’s modern alternative.

I hope Apple has gotten it right this time. With my workflow, I really can’t say that using something as child-like as TextEdit for my word processor has caused me any grief. It’s just that doing has made me feel like I’ve been sitting on the sidelines.

But all that aside, I’m feeling rather philosophical about the recent symbolic demise of AppleWorks. For awhile there, I felt that AppleWorks defined the Mac platform more than any other single aspect of the platform. What a long way we’ve come, eh?