News of AppleWorks nee ClarisWorks being officially dead. Not that it wasn't already because there hasn't been an update in forever, but it got me all sniffly for my old G3 powerbook. I had mostly forgotten about AW but it was one of the reasons I switched to mac (before os x even existed). It was the first computer I bought completely with my own money. 2000 bucks--that was a lot a the time--I had to get a loan from the bank.
After about 2 weeks I realized that the user interface of OS 9 was way better than win or linux (though comparing macos to blackbox is a little weird) or solaris, and it's still superior to the current OS X interface. Back then they didn't have this crazy idea that everything had to look lickable and/or fucking brushed metal and whatever they call this new thing... brushed dick? Shaded-for-no-reason-porcelin? My itunes is a stylish toilet bowl. OS 9 on my 400mhz powerbook was, for the most part, more responsive and snappy than OS X on my 1.5ghz powerbook. The new intel ones are pretty good but still occasionally laggier than I would like or expect.
Other things that were awesome about that Powerbook:
First laptop I ever used that seemed like it could be used for a whole day without breaking your hands or eyes (i.e. good screen & good keyboard; pretty rare in those days.
It was made of plastic and that tough rubbery stuff that thinkpads are covered in. It seemed more solid and durable than current models.
The hinge was such that the screen is not sunk down as far as on the new ones; creating a more favourable viewing angle which is noticible after a while.
You could hold it in one hand without risk of dropping (as opposed to the slippery metal ones).
It had two bays that could be used for batteries, external drives, etc. You could get like 10 hours out of the thing with 2 batteries.
Two firewire ports! Remember this back when all other computers had maybe 2 USB v1 ports, so data transfer > 2 MB was a pain in the ass.
Sleep-on-lid-close and wake-on-lid-open worked perfectly even then.
Networking just worked. I could move to a different network (wired or wireless) and just pick it up, without rebooting. That was truly unprecedented at the time. And after some recent unsolicited XP experience I'd say it's actually still unprecedented. Combined with the lid thing I had weeks of uptime even though I took it everywhere in my backpack on my bike.
Anyway, I remember Appleworks fondly as a non-autocorrecting, non-clippy, not-menubar-ridden, simple and responsive wordprocessor/spreadsheet/drawing program. Not too fancy but it had everything a young lad needed to get his compute on. When I had to switch to Word for work I was saddened because Word is slow, expensive, and has about 200 features I don't care about. That's why I write my journal in vi now. The drawing program was the best; you could quickly make diagrams of anything, which I did ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
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Excerpt from my journal, written in Appleworks, circa 6 years ago yesterday:
Aside: The guy from the Old Main Record Store just came by and said "It's
not as fun as operating a turntable" is it? What stupid thing to say. Of
course, it's the kind of stupid thing *I* would say... I wonder if I'm going to
end up like that guy. Old and still awkward around people. That's what it
is, just being awkward around people.
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The next computer I buy with my own money will be Linux Thinkpad, methinks.