Freakin new Appleworks

pbmac

pbmac

MacTV is your friend
I believe that the next big software package to come from Apple will be AppleWorks, or whatever
the next version will be called. Why do I believe this? Well, apart from the need to create an Office v.X alternative (following Safari's footsteps), a simple glance at the program itself should prove that something must be done. Considering Apple's push to improve its products, this seems to be the last frontier. What do you think?

- pbmac
 
I never have found appleworks that user friendly, although I came from a PC world 5 years ago, when Office 97 was brand spankin new. once I got Office 98 for the Mac I hardly used Appleworks. Something about the interface I didn't like.

If they were to improve upon the concept I would rather enjoy using it. No matter how much I like v.X I would like the choice of a different enterprise level office suite.
 
I guess alternatives are good, but Office X works well, and if Apple proves to MS that there is no need to develop software for Macs then we lose a good argument for switching to Mac. "You can open the same Word files on Mac as you can on PC... except you have to do it in Appleworks." That's all fine and good but as soon as the next version of Word comes out the conversions will start to get worse and worse until there are serious incompatibilites between the two and we're back at "Macs can't function in an office environment." I may not like MS, but the Mac BU has done all right as far as I'm concerned and I hope MS doesn't decide that the Mac market is too small to care about and pull the plug on the MBU. Office could use some speed boosts, though, Office on PCs of comparable speed runs much faster.

Safari had to come out since no one was doing a decent job on the browser front (though some will contest that Omniweb and Chimera were adequate, I'd disagree). I don't think there is the same necessity for Appleworks.
 
I agree. I dunno how smart it would be to make a complete replacement, and discourage the Mac unit of Microsoft. I couldn't care less in what program I open my documents, but the public.... they need Microsoft Word, even if it does look all Aqua-y... they need that name recognition. They don't care what it is, just as long as it's made my Microsoft, fully compatible, and has the same name.
 
Originally posted by adambyte
I agree. I dunno how smart it would be to make a complete replacement, and discourage the Mac unit of Microsoft. I couldn't care less in what program I open my documents, but the public.... they need Microsoft Word, even if it does look all Aqua-y... they need that name recognition. They don't care what it is, just as long as it's made my Microsoft, fully compatible, and has the same name.
Click to expand...

Apple made an office product which would be what Keynote is to P.Point and call it:
:) Office X for Mac? :p :D ;)
 
In case you all hadn't noticed, www.MacOSRumors.com is reporting that MS is indeed stopping support for OSX. Go have a read. While i can understand your worries about the "compatibility" issue. For one, Office is only updated once every... 2 years? Apple usually ships a major revision of all its software in 12 month intervals. So, supposing we had the rumored Document.app, and a handful of other office-apps in a new Office suite from apple. They release Document.app 1.0 (or a beta i guess) which will read all versions of Word files, plus of course txt, html, rtf, xml, etc. In 6 months time, the new version of Office for Winodws comes out, there is no Mac version. Apple work out what's changed, release an update saying.. "This update allows Document.app to read and write the latest version of MS Word documents, as well as various other enhancements and bug-fixes"
Personally i think that people in IT are slowly beginning to realise that Microsoft isn't quite the god they thought it was. More and more companies/people are turning to alternatives, and often they are finding OPEN standards will provide a solution. Just think how much easier the world would be if everyone used .rtf instead of .doc???
 
Safari is fine because it's free, exactly like IE. I don't see where the money train rolls in with the Explorer stamp on it... however, MS Office:Mac makes MS money, and it supports the MBU, leading to more & better MS products for Mac.
 
I hope Apple can rework the Appleworks to make it more intuitive and user friendly... I can never tap into the more advance features of this powerful app. It does too many things but I just cannot TAP it... not intuitive enough... and I hate having to refer to "help" all the time... sigh...
 
I'm holding out for NeoOffice. It's going to be great. I'm already using OpenOffice in X to read .doc but I do all editing in TextEdit. I agree that MS is needed tho, it's just a fscking shame that they can't play nice.
 
Even though Office for OS X is cosmetically more appealing than its PC counterpart, it always lacked the features of a Windows version. Outlook and Word for Windows has far more features than the OS X version.

Apple could potentially dive in and develop a real hardnose business product here (instead of all this consumer production)... something aimed at getting Macs into offices with hundreds of users.

But, Apple never seem to do 'seriously serious' business orientated applications... iCal and Address Book could be better business orientated for a start (also, if they plan on us using these two products with other office-type apps, then I feel some sort of better integration is necessary (they feel like seperate apps in my eyes at present)).
 
M$ has agreed, previously, that they would produce one more version of office. Nothing has been agreed upon beyond that, between Apple and M$. Following their current announcement, I feel we will see the final version, and that is that. Apple is supposedly working on a new Appleworks, one reason is M$ will not continue to support Mac.
 
Even though Office for OS X is cosmetically more appealing than its PC counterpart, it always lacked the features of a Windows version. Outlook and Word for Windows has far more features than the OS X version.
Click to expand...
Ok. Now i'm assuming you're comparing Office2000/XP to Office v.X, and Windows Outlook to OS X Entourage..
I admit that Outlook does probably have some more "features" than Entourage, but personally I find Entourage bloated anyways. As for Word. The microsoft guff at when it was released said "Office v.X has features never seen before in ANY version of Office, even the current Windows version"
Now, that was compared to 2000 I think, but don't forget they haven't released a new mac version since X, while windows got Office XP last year.
And. as I said before, and i would like to think many people will agree, while a lot of "new" computer users might think they "need" Office, and can't use a mac if there isn't a mac version, if apple creates a high quality office suite, anyone who is SERIOUSLY looking at buying a mac, will ask about office, and will be told that the new office suite will work with office files without a problem. There will always be people saying "Macs are crap, you can't use <insert random app here> on a mac"
I also don't understand peoples fear of losing microsoft "support". Let's just think. What have they actually given us that is useful? I will list the MS apps for OSX that I have, or am aware of.

Internut Exploder:
Well. What can I say. It's crap. Don't kid yourselves, any version of IE, on any OS/platform is utter crap. case-in-point: What other browser when you enter a url (www.php.net for this eg) "looks" for it, then sends you to an MSN.com search page saying "www.php.net was not found blah blah" while the exact same version of windows/ie on an IDENTICAL computer, on the same network, will work fine. And then. ping www.php.net and you get an ip. go to that ip, and suddenly iexplorer CAN find www.php.net, because it is either forwarded, or resolves the ip address.

Word:
Not bad I guess, as word processors go. But nothing really dazzling. Many others do the same job as good, if not better.

Excel:
Same again. Im not aware of any individual spread sheet apps, but every office suite has one (AppleWorks, kOffice, OpenOffice, gnome Office suite)

PowerPoint:
While it may have been one of the only ones before, keynote seems to have take the limelight.

Entourage:
Well. I used it for quite a while, simply for want of a better client that had more advanced features than mail.app and an interface i liked. I found it, GyazMail.

Frontpage:
I have no idea what this is like for osx, if it even exists. I saw once, a reference to frontpage 1.0 for mac os, so im assuming there was at least A release of the software, for either 8.6-9.2 or X.
Either way, we won't be missing anything without it. I'm not sure the ability to create MS-Proprietary "HTML" is really high on any one's agenda.

Every product that microsoft has, there is an alternative. From XBOX to Windows to MSN messenger. The thing is, despite the competition usually being cheaper, easier to use, more secure, and with more thought of the user in mind, there are still sh!t-loads of people around that swear by microsoft products. I would think that people using macs would realise that microsoft products are actually quite crappy, and the alternatives are (almost*) always better in every aspect.

*The only Microsoft product i've seen that is superior to the competition is the xbox, simply because the PS2 was released 2(?) years earlier.
 
I've never liked AppleWorks because it is rather anemic with respect to functions that M$ Office has. You can do a lot with Word and Excel. The graphing capabilities in Excel are far superior to AppleWorks. As a chemist playing around with numbers and graphs, AppleWorks just doesn't have the functionality I need. If Apple is indeed working on such a project (major overhall of AppleWorks), then it seriously needs to re-evaluate the customers who will be using it, business people, scientists, and engineers. Excel even has a function to do the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), an invaluable tool used for signal processing. One way Apple could shine in the area of accuracy is to make sure the calculations follow IEEE standards. M$ Excel cannot be used in the pharmaceutical inductry for calculations, especially involving linear regression, because it makes shortcuts in the calculations that make every number after the 2nd decimal place (100ths) total and utter garbage. Excel is great for business calculations and for scientists and engineers getting "rough estimates", but I wouldn't use it to plot out the trajectory for launching a Mars explorer. The accuracy and precision just are not there. If you want numerical results without round-off error, then consider using MATLAB, made by The Math Works.
 
My concern with Apple updating every 6months to 1year is that while they may want desperately to maintain compatibility with Word, what's to make MS release all the specs on the latest behind the scenes nature of .doc files? Their standards are closed, and people have to reverse engineer them basically. Word is, for better or worse, the de facto standard in documents. It drives me nuts sometimes (and my wife even more when she gets sent Word docs to read in Linux) but that's the way it is.

Unless some legal decision that I'm unaware of forced MS to reveal all that goes into the formatting of .doc they can force incompatibilities of conversion by just keeping their secrets to themselves.
 
Yes Lazarus, they can. But don't forget that not everyone has the latest and greates Office for Windows either. Normally the things that "break" compatibility are NEW features. General text in a word file is basically HTML written so that only Word reads it. And if apple can work out how to import & export Powerpoint im sure they can reverse engineer a word document.

PS. It's actually illegal to reverse engineer microsoft (probably all commercial) software, but we won't tell Apple that.
 
I could see Adobe PDF as being a good file format to use. Almost everyone has a reader for it. Except Apple Office would have the writer too.
The package should be a combo like iLife is. It would take Keynote, Document?, Mail/iCal and some database/spreadsheet app.
The ability to import quicktime, pictures, and read various other formats is a must.

A drawing/painting program is a good idea but perhaps it could incorporate the
tablet and give more options to import other formats. I guess that is a seperate project but the casual user might want to draw a picture of their cat. who knows!
 
Ape, we already have a pdf "writer".
goto print, and click the preview or save as pdf buttons. But i agree that pdfs are a great format for documents. I always use pdf anyway, as im using Mellel for word processing at the moment, and it doesnt save as .doc files.
 
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