always waiting for spinning lolipop

Welcome to Apple Discussions Marty

This is the most complained about bug in AppleWorks 6 - known as the "Recent Items bug." Take a look in the highlighted AppleWorks Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) folder near the top of the entry of this forum for the User-Contributed Tips & Answers folder. In there are three articles dealing with Recent Items.

] Dale Gillard - AppleWorks slow? Spinning ball appears?
] Dale Gillard - Recent items not visible/updated
] Yvan Koenig - No more Recent Items

AppleWorks remembers every document ever opened. As this fills up, it slows down performance. This folder is located in HD/Users/username/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items. Trash all of the aliases in this folder & restart AppleWorks. You should see an improvement.

For those who may wonder why this topic stays at the top of the list of posts when it is older, the moderators have made it "sticky" because this is such a frequently posted problem.

In addition to the Recent Items folder bug, the AutoSave feature also can cause a build-up of documents within the AutoSave folder, which in turn can slow AW down considerably. You should check this folder from time-to-time, and pare it down to size by deleting the oldest files based on their creation dates.

Some people recommend turning off AutoSave, but you might not want to do that. AutoSave keeps a record of your most recently used files, and AW uses these files to rescue documents that you may have been working on but had not save when AW crashes, or the computer suddenly turns off.

PLEASE HELP ME! I tried to fix this problem by trashing as directed and now my file is only a very old version (1 page instead of 10!!!!) Is there a way to restore this file? PLease, I need your help!

It certainly sounds like you didn't find the correct folder. There is one of these folders for each user account. Try following this path: HD -> Users -> username -> Documents -> AppleWorks User Data -> Starting Points -> Recent Items. You can tell the difference between actual documents & aliases by looking for a small, curved arrow in the lower left of the icon of an alias.

OK, but how do I find my file now?

If you trashed it & emptied the Trash, I'm afraid it's gone.

I did not empty the trash. But when i dragged it out of the trash and tried to open it, it was the old version (1 as opposed to 10 pages). While we're at it, I had also saved it a little earlier as a pdf, and that is still there, but can I convert it to an editable document?

You can use the text select tool in Adobe Reader to select the text in the PDF, and copy it to a new AW document. If you have a scanner, you can use the OCR software to capture the text, and most of its formatting, to a new file format. You can, I believe, use NeoOffice/J to open the PDF and resave it as a text file, or as a Word.doc file, which you can then convert to an AW file. I just used TextEdit to open a PDF, but I have a feeling it used a TextLightning plugin--but TextLightning is another good utility for recovering formatted text from PDFs.

It appears you've misread the information about fixing this bug. You were not meant to delete your recent documents, but to delete the alias files that 'point' to your recent documents.

I'd recommend re-reading the information provided in the earlier message as you may not have taken the steps required to resolve the issue.

Also, the reason your AppleWorks document was not saved was because you moved it to the Trash. This is a known bug in AppleWorks. If you open a file in AppleWorks and then rename it in the Finder, or move it to a new location, AppleWorks will not save it.

As you have a PDF copy of the document you can copy and paste the text from it to a new AppleWorks document.

I am having the save issue of the spinning lollipop. Is there any way to fix this problem? Appleworks 6.2.9 on OS 10.3.2 with all current updates.

Chad

Peggy's message #1 in this thread answers your question. It links to a number of FAQ documents that explain the problem and help you manage it.

I have followed Peggy's instructions and, although some improvement, still have OS 9 spinning wheel before OS 10 spinning wheel for 10-15 seconds. I have Appleworks 6 in my OS 10 apps and Appleworks 5 in my OS 9 apps on my desk top.
I also have an IBook without AppleWorks 5 and Appleworks 6 works just fine without any delays or spinning wheels.
Should I trash everything to do with Appleworks 5?

Did you also check Gene's message #2 in this thread? There should be no problem having, & even running, both AppleWorks 5 & 6 on the same computer. They use different resources - translators, spell check, etc. Both the OS X & OS 9 applications folders should be on the first level of your hard drive, not on the Desktop. In OS X, the desktop is a folder in each user's account.

I meant to say on my desk top computer (Blue -gray G3). Apps are in First level.
I removed Appleworks 5 but this did not change wait for the spinning loliop.