I keep getting the colored spinning mouse wheel every couple of minutes
I keep getting the colored spinning mouse wheel every couple of minutes. I have a mini mac with 10.4 OS and Appleworks 6.2.9. I only seem to notice the spinning wheel when using Appleworks.
You have run into the "Recent Items bug" that has been around since AppleWorks 6 was released in March, 2000. It can make it appear that AppleWorks has frozen or failed to launch. The user tip by Dale Gillard,
AppleWorks slow? Spinning ball appears?, explains a lot.
If Autosave is turned OFF, AW functions much better/faster.
When closing a document, if you get a warning that the doc was changed and has not been saved, do NOT select the Save option. Instead, select Cancel and Save yourself. Years ago it was noticed that selecting the Save option when a file was being closed caused the file to have errors.
This is one of my questions. I wondered if there was an Autosave function in Appleworks. You answered my question - thank you!
I'm responding to this thread, though, because I've spent the past couple of days trying to figure out why I sometimes can't open documents, getting a "File appears to be damaged and cannot be opened". Sometimes, if I would shut down and try when first booting up, I could open it.
After a day of cleaning up caches and things, I ran into a few threads about "Save As", and now the post about clicking on "Save" when trying to close an unsaved file. I've done both with the documents that get corrupted, and needless to say I won't be doing those things anymore. Does anyone know
why those functions don't work, and why, if they've known about this for years, they haven't fixed the daggone thing?
Those Mac/PC commercials are
really beginning to annoy me! But at least I got my computer all cleaned up yesterday.
Does anyone know why those functions don't work, and why, if they've known about this for years, they haven't fixed the daggone thing?
AW is now what you'd call, I guess, legacy software, no longer sold or directly supported by or through Apple. It actually has been four years, or more, since it last received any upgrades or other improvements at all, and obviously none are forthcoming.
What word processing/spreadsheet/presentation software is now used in place of Appleworks? I bought my iMac G5 in Oct. 2004 and Appleworks was installed on it.
AW is still used for all of those things, and still works very well. Although Apple has announced iWork as the replacement for AW, in point of fact not all of the functions are duplicated at all (databases), others are just pale imitations (spreadsheets, drawing and painting modules), and the core function (word processing) has a totally different look and feel and, I believe, orientation to it — more like a page layout approach than a WP one. The presentation portion of it, however, known as Keynote, is much superior to AW.
What is used in place of AW for 'serious' work these days? Well, again, you can continue to use AW. Or, if you want or need to, you can use Office: Mac, or NeoOffice, the open-source clone of it which is free and works well for most things. There are spot fixes for WP, with many fine programs out there to choose from, but rather less to chose from in spreadsheets and databases and such.
I'm pretty sure that 10.5 (Leopard) will be the last OS that AW will work on as, I believe, the next one (10.6, still unnamed) is currently rumored to be Intel-only (no PPC support at all). It's also possible that some future hardware platform won't be able to run it even if you do use Leopard or earlier on it as an OS, but I don't see that as all that likely or even something to be concerned about.
Bottom line? For today and the foreseeable future, AW does and will work just fine with current hardware/software configurations. We still use it on a daily basis and don't plan on changing any time soon. The quirks it has (and there are some, as you'll see from hanging out in this excellent forum) are pretty much known and identified with clear and effective ways to work around them, and the things it currently can't do it will never be able to do at all; this, in a strange way, actually becomes a net positive when compared to trying to keep track of continually evolving software packages.
