WEIRD - Explain this one ??!!

[Khama]

OK heres the story .....

My sister in law called me this weekend and asked me to come over and check out this new computer (New to her) that she found sitting at the dumpster. Said it was an iMac and wanted me to come check it out and make sure everything worked.

So I go over to the house yesterday after work. Sure enough shes got a 400mhz iMac gumdrop on the counter. She also found a bag of stuff next to the computer. A Queue CD burner, Iomega external floppy, cable modem, Cannon Bubblejet printer and all the cords.

So we hook up the machine and fire it up. Everything is going fine, the machine boots into OS 9.2 and I proceed to check it out.

Well it needed more memory, and lucky for me, I happened to have a PC 100 256mb chip with me. So I upgrade the memory and proceed to upgrade the machine to Panther 10.3

Install goes fine, and it boots to Mac OS X

Well she wanted to do some drawing and illustrations on the machine, but with no internet connection, I was unable to visit versiontracker to search for some shareware freeware stuff for her.

Well she says, "Will the Appleworks thing work?"

Appleworks? Should run fine under classic, I tell her and proceed to locate the old application in the Applications (OS 9) folder.

I click it and it launches just fine. I show her it works, and explain that if she wants to run anything under the OS 9 application folder, that it will run under classic.

I proceed to launch "Graphing Calculator" cause she asks "what is that?" and all of a sudden I realize that I am now seeing the Classic system launch.

I think ? Why didnt classic launch when I launched Appleworks?

So I go in and turn off classic in the System Preferences. and verify it has stopped.

Then I go an launch Appleworks 6 again.

OK, no classic window and Appleworks launches ...... IN OS X !!!!

Quit Appleworks and go launch something else in the OS 9 Application folder, sure enough, Classic launches.

So how does Appleworks 6, installed under OS 9.2 and then upgraded to OS X - Launch under OS X ???

Shouldnt Classic launch - THEN Appleworks?

Anyway, I thought it was WEIRD ( VERY COOL, but weird ) and couldnt understand how it is working myself.

Can anyone here explain how or why it launches in OS X ??

[adambyte]

AppleWorks, starting with version 6-point something, was made Carbon.... OS X native... it will run under both OS 9 and OS X natively. It's supposed to do that.

[Khama]

I understand that, but it was installed with no OSX on it at the time. Only OS 9 was on the machine when it was installed.

So the same .app that runs under OS 9 also runs under OS X ? Without additional OS X support files, ect?

[sinclair_tm]

thats right. appleworks must have been updated to the point that it was a carbon app (which means that the os 9 and os x versions are basically the same), and when you installed os x, it saw it as a carbon app and set the pref to launch in os x because who wants to wait for classic to start to launch an app if it can run native x. besides, because appleworks is carbon, it is a package app meaning that all the support files are part of the app, and not in other files or folders.

[leydog]

When Appleworks was updated, I believe the update would install to optimize for either OS 9 or OS X, whichever it was running under at the time of updating. It still runs under either system. You can update Appleworks for free clear up to 6.2.9 on this page:
http://www.apple.com/appleworks/update/
Incidentally, I am running OS X version 10.4.6 on two 400MHz iMacs in my classroom. I did have to upgrade them to 512 MB of RAM. Tiger feels faster than Panther to me on those old G3s, though they are slow compared to G4s. I bought a Firewire DVD drive so I could boot off external DVDs (such as the Tiger install disc).

Your sister-in-law made a great find. Get that girl on Broadband Internet.

[Mikuro]

Yeah, it's normal. Similar to the universal binaries we see now, which will run natively on both PPC and Intel Macs, during the transition to OS X, there were apps that would run in both. That's really what Carbon was designed for from the get-go; it's just that these days most Carbon apps don't run in OS 9 because most apps use modern X-only technologies.

You can choose to run such apps in Classic if you really want to. Just Get Info on the app in the Finder and check the "Open in the Classic Environment". I've never seen an actual reason to do this, though.

The latest version of AppleWorks is X-only, by the way.