Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

“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 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/

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.

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

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 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.

> 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.

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