A Brief History of ClarisWorks (2003) | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of ClarisWorks (2003)

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86 pointsWoodenChair40 comments

I have fond memories of ClarisWorks in elementary school. My elementary school in the 1990s had a bunch of Apple Macintosh Performa 575 and 580 machines running Mac OS 7.5; the school still had them as late as 2001 when I completed sixth grade. At the earlier grade levels we learned typing (using "All the Right Type") and LOGO programming, and starting around fourth grade we learned how to write basic reports using ClarisWorks' word processor. I am also familiar with the drawing tool that is part of ClarisWorks.

I've been collecting classic Macs for the past 16 years, ever since one of my teachers gave me a Macintosh SE and a Performa 6220. Every now and then I boot one of my classic Macs and open up ClarisWorks. One of the things I like about most software written for the classic Mac OS is their strict adherence to the Apple Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking, but Apple Pages and Apple Numbers do not spark the same joy in me that ClarisWorks did, though Apple Keynote is a superb software product. I've tried using Apple Pages and Apple Numbers in the past, and I often end up resorting to LibreOffice, despite the fact that LibreOffice's interface isn't Mac-like while Pages and Numbers are first-party programs. It's hard for me to articulate this objectively, but Pages and Numbers seem to deviate from the traditional UI for word processors and spreadsheets, respectively, and I'm just more comfortable with more traditional word processors like ClarisWorks/AbiWord/Microsoft Word/LibreOffice Writer and traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel/Gnumeric/LibreOffice Calc. I've tried Pages and Numbers, but I find myself reaching for LibreOffice.

Perhaps it would be nice if somebody created a modern-day ClarisWorks as a type of counter-weight to Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.

“though Apple Keynote is a superb software product”

My theory on that: people at Apple actually use Keynote. I imagine it’s the part of that software suite that’s used throughout the company. See: WWDC presentations.

Keynote was originally made for Steve Jobs to make his keynote presentations with. It became a shipping product later. I'm fairly sure it was the first product in the iWork line, from its time of conception, but don't quote me on that.

I kinda like the UI of Nisus Writer [0], prefer it over Microsoft Office and Pages. It's kinda basic which to me kinda evokes the ClarisWorks feeling.

Sadly, the Microsoft Office import / export has never been great when I used this app (perhaps improved now?). And sadly many companies still rely on Office, so compatibility is kind of a must.

---

[0]: https://www.nisus.com

I was using Nisus writer in the pre OSX days. I had forgotten about it and I am amazed it still exists and is actively developed.

WriteNow was even less bloated than Nisus Writer. I was thrilled when they added style sheets and then stopped. Well, I think they stopped more from going out of business but it was the right balance between lightweight yet usefull for moderately complex documents.

Yup, word is a beast but if you have a large, complex, structured/technical document it's pretty hard to beat. Once I learned just how easy section references were I would never do a contract in anything else. You mean as I move sections around all my references automatically update when I update the table of contents? Yes please!

I used ClarisWorks for school too. It struck me as well made, even though at the time I was uninterested in programming. My friends had Windows, and Microsoft Word struck me as a bloated mess. I suppose my impression was from the speed, orderliness of the menus, and cleanliness of the graphic design.

Also remember when it was replaced by AppleWorks. I didn't like it as much as ClarisWorks, but I still liked it more than Word. The problem with the world is that it just has no taste.

I also used ClarisWorks in school, and made a bit of money in ~2005 by helping a science teacher convert her old AppleWorks documents to Word. I wrote an AppleScript to open each document and Save As, and within a few hours it was done.

My experience of Logo programming was even earlier though, around 1997, on a Mac Plus. It was great! I even played songs by generating tones at the right frequencies. More recently I rewrote Logo in JavaScript so I could draw a time-proportional train map. http://peterburk.github.io/tra/

> but Pages and Numbers seem to deviate from the traditional UI for word processors and spreadsheets

Good. Overloaded toolbars suck. Hundreds of undecipherable icons instead of text sucks. Excessive modal dialogues for things like advanced paragraph styling, bullet formatting, spacing, indentation, and page layout sucks.

The best thing iWork ever did was take all the things that were hidden and put them in plain sight without oodles of near-identical icons trying to represent abstract concepts, with good ol' plain text and hierarchisation in NeXTSTEP-style floating inspectors.

iWork's best UI was in '09 (and maybe a few versions before, though I don't remember them all that well) with the floating inspectors. They showed everything in a usable, vertical format, same as the current inspector panels, but easily movable. They still exist to in modern iWork, though I find it has too many top-level sections.

The pièce de résistance of iWork '09 was the context-sensitive toolbar beneath the customisable NSToolbar: depending on what you had clicked on, it would show different tools so that you didn't have to constantly click through the inspector's various sections. Best of all, it wasn't some weird floating palette that randomly seemed to fade in and out as in Microsoft Office; it was always there, glued to the top of the window. The hand knew exactly where to go.

You could do most of the basic formatting tasks using just the toolbar. I mourn its loss. Maybe one day Apple will bring it back.

The inspectors gave you what the ribbon tried to do, logically ordering all the myriad tools available; the context-sensitive toolbar filled the gap that the inspectors made, making it so you didn't have to constantly switch between inspector sections. To me, that was bliss. Current iWork is close but it was better as it was.

This was in a category of good software that doesn’t exist much today, and you just know it when you experience it.

Apps like this were filled with features that don’t fit into regular marketing bullet points but were evidence of care and attention. I used the graphics module all the time and it had some great ones. Example: I would select an object, copy it, paste it, then immediately move the pasted object; then, when I pasted the object a second time, ClarisWorks moved the new one for me by the same relative amount. That turned a tedious layout task into exactly what I wanted, in seconds.

And of course “any kind of document frame anywhere” was unbelievable at the time.

Today, when I think of just the time I spend with something like the fiddly and frustrating text selection mechanism on iOS (that I used to write this comment), we have lost something as an industry. Software can be a craft, not just something you slap together.

My instinct is that this is partly due to how hard it was to get upgrades as a user. Devs would have taken the release cycle very seriously when people couldn't just get the next microversion pushed to them. I remember bringing home updates on 3.5in floppies, or having to download them on slow dialup connections, all very much about pull not push.

> And of course “any kind of document frame anywhere” was unbelievable at the time.

Couldn't Ashton-Tate's Framework do that kind of things too? I can't remember.

Ugh - text selection is what drove me back to a MacBook Air from my iPad Pro. Now that they have tablet support I should really give it a try, but on the other hand I just can't be bothered. Multitasking/app switching is so much easier on macOS for me too.

Maybe of Apple finally figures out how they want multitasking to work on iPad OS and stops changing it, it would be worth giving it another solid try - but I'm not yet convinced it's worth it.

Apple still has a Vancouver office and it’s still responsible for some of its consumer software. Not sure, but I believe Numbers and Pages?

Also one correction. MacWrite Pro wasn’t held up by stringent quality control, it was held up by a poor architecture. The project lead told me all document state was stored in globals with unrestricted access. Fixing a bug in one area frequently created a bug elsewhere.

I worked on the windows version of ClarisWorks. I remember the Vancouver boys were really focused, they were the most hard edged, hard driving team at Claris, which I found refreshing.

I think iWork engineering is (also) in Pittsburgh.

MacWrite Pro was a UI dream though. Slow as molasses, but so intuitive. You could do serious page layout on it with ease. One of the best designed pieces of software I’ve ever used.

Especially compared to Word in the same era. In fact that infamous screen shot where the toolbars take up 90% of the screen was Mac Word 5.

I should get the IIfx out and see if it still boots :p

I trained 100s of people on ClarisWorks in the 90s. It was absolutely amazing, and it just worked. The elegance and the simplicity were second to none. It was so good that I was able to turn folks who didn’t know how to use a mouse into CW power users in 2-3 months. It was like magic.

I had the privilege of being in the same Go club in Boston with Bob around 99-02, and I have to say that he’s also a super nice guy. He told me this story f2f during that time, and I’m glad to see that he documented it for posterity’s sake.

Starting a tech biz is so much easier today.

I actually purchased GoBe Productive 2 for BeOS R5, and version 3 for Windows a couple of years later. It was my default office app for most of the decade. It’s a pity that the source is lost, because it was a nicer app than StarOffice at the time (IMHO) and it might have survived in an open source format.

That must have been one of the very few commercial apps for BeOS.

One, but there were others. Moho comes to mind, but there were others such as Tune Tracker.. there was at least one DAW that came with BeOS and a custom app to run the hardware too. There were a few games.. Chorum 3 is one I have a copy of. There was a version of the Opera browser at one point too.

I have a copy of it for BeOS too. It runs on both PowerPC and Intel. It was pretty nice at the time. I'm sure it is incapable of doing anything with modern documents though.

So they really wanted to call their product "something"works. Is that just because it was a Microsoft Works competitor, or was there other software using "Works" to refer to integrated office software?

Also, I see a lot of places describing the Claris offices as 6 miles from Apple HQ, probably all from this source. Where was it exactly? I'd imagine in that commercial area in Sunnyvale and north Santa Clara, but I've biked around that area many times and never noticed a "wedge."

AppleWorks started on the Apple II in 1984. Microsoft Works apparently was originally written by the same engineer after he left Apple (!!) but then licensed it to Microsoft, it came out in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

Clarisworks was a successor to AppleWorks for the Apple 2/2gs computers. Don't recall when MS Works launched but they didn't have an exclusive on the name. IIRC Appleworks was launched alongside ProDOS.

Ah I found the wedge, still an apple office, and I had biked quite close to it at least once. On Patrick Henry Dr.

I remember the database records feature that let you lay out the design of records in an intuitive way, even though I was too young to use it for anything! I haven't been able to find anything like it since. The other feature I used a lot was outlining, the WYISWYG Mac philosophy was great for preparing printed pages of notes.

ClarisWorks generally got UI features for new OS-supported features very early relative to other default apps. Despite being ostenibly a word processor, ClarisWorks was the first tool I was able to use for ripping songs from CD's.

I barely used ClarisWorks, but was very familiar with its BeOS-based successor, Gobe Productive. It was an incredible application; I used it as my primary office suite for years. It was just so well-integrated and thoughtfully designed; I have yet to see its equal.

Whether this kind of brilliant integration and thoughtfulness is something that could carry over to the kind of comprehensive feature sets of Microsoft Office or Libre Office is a valid question. My hunch is that it could. I wish somebody would try.

Gobe was independent of the beos and had a windows and linux offering, but only had a small team out of portland in the late 90s and never had the success it deserved.

For those that are curious, Bob Hearn is now a pretty successful ultra runner. He seems to especially enjoy multi-day events. I met him at a 100 miler in NC a few years ago.

https://www.irunfar.com/2020/02/age-old-runners-bob-hearn.ht...

He blogs about his running these days here:

https://bobhearn.blogspot.com

Haven't thought about AppleWorks in a long time. I followed a pretty common path for the time. AppleWorks in high school. Went to college, where everyone used WordPerfect combined with Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro. Then MS Office came bundled with Windows so that was what everyone used, in spite of Excel being a flaming pile of [...].

I remember using Lotus at home. My uncle was a programmer and he taught me how to use the command line and Lotus. Also remember using Logo, drawing some shapes with the turtle.

>(1969)

This seems to be a bug:

>Last Modified: December 31, 1969 Open of lock file "/HITS/.lck" failed.

It states clearly at the top that it was written in 2003.

Apple did not exist in 1969. The Mac did not exist until 1984.

Perhaps the footer is a joke, as if the true timestamp failed to load but was interpreted as Unix timestamp zero in a different time zone?

> Note: this page was written in early 2003.

>Last Modified: December 31, 1969

Lol, this must be autogenerated. A timestamp of 0 will fall on 1969-12-31 for many time zones.

What I wonder is why the author added this note, and didn't get the code that generates this fixed.

> 1969

Nice.

My career started around age 10, as I published my first page online. It was built on a pirated copy of Claris HomePage. Thanks, Claris!

I built my first site (about five pages, mostly sharing some family pictures I’d scanned in on my dad’s fancy color SCSI scanner) in Claris HomePage, and put it on a Whistle InterJet that had a static public IP address.

Back then domain names were something like $80 or $100, so I decided to forego a domain and use the IP. The site didn’t get much traffic besides my own visits!

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