always waiting for spinning lolipop

The difference between your two Macs is probably not that one has AppleWorks 5 & the other doesn't. If you don't use AW 6 on the one without AW 5 as often, there is not going to be as many aliases in the Recent Items folder. If you have emptied this folder of all aliases & it is still slow, you probably need to do some basic OS X maintenance. First, run Disk Utility & repair permissions. Then run one of the many available "cron" utilities such as YASU, MacJanitor or OnyX.

Hi Robert

The only known cause of spinning cursor delays is the recent items bug and the autosave bug.

If you've read the FAQ's noted in this thread and followed their advice then this usually resolves the problem.

The only other things you could do are the usual troubleshooting steps: delete AppleWorks preferences (see Peggy's FAQ titled 'When AppleWorks isn't working properly'), and have Disk Utility repair the permissions on your Mac. There are other troubleshooting steps you can undertake (eg deleting cache files), but these have not been associated with the spinning cursor problem.

Pls let us know how you go with these suggestions.

this appleworks 6 problex with OSX is quite aggravating to understate things.

AW was quick and nibmle and it ends up cripped.

apple has yet to give us a fix.

so here are my 2 cents.

if the default save folder is appleworks is the documents folder and you place all your documents there (regardless of type...EG PDF, wordperfect, etc) my impression is that this adds to appleworks' building sullugishness.

I hope other's can critique my naive suggestions here but...

I guess the options are
a) keep the OSX documents folder exclusively for appleworks
b) create an appleworks documents folder and only use appleworks files within it.

Hello Ess

Welcome to the AppleWorks Discussion.

The default Save folder and the Documents folder are not related to this problem.

The problem and a workaround have been identified for years (see the User Contributed Tips & Answers section in the AppleWorks FAQs of this Discussion forum). The cause is the Recent Items and AutoSave folders. Periodically emptying these folders is the only workaround.

Cheers.

Hi ess,

Welcome to Apple Discussions and to the AppleWorks Forum.

Neither of the options you suggest should have any effect on the speed of AppleWorks (or of any other application), although they may affect the amount of time it takes the user to find or save a document.

Generally, it's better to organize document storage by topic than by application, but this is a choice to be made by the user. Under Mac OS 9 (and earlier), users could choose (in the General Controls control panel) to have applications automatically go to 1. a folder set by the application, 2. the last folder used by the application, or 3. the documents folder when the Open or Save dialogues were opened. I suspect this is also true in OS X.

My choice has been for option 2. Usually I'm working on documents either in a single folder, or in folders that are located relatively close to each other, so using this option saves me some navigating time. As in most things involving computers, YMMV, and this may not be the best choice for you.

The prime cause of slowdowns in AW 6 is the one identified by Dale--AW's failure to clean out its Recent Items folder. The cure is to periodically clean out the folder yourself, to turn off the 'Remember recent items' feature in AppleWorks, or both. Clearing the folder can be done manually, or more easily, by using an AppleScript available at an address in one of Dale's posts earlier in this thread, or in the FAQ posts on this topic.

Regards,
Barry

I found 19 files in my recent items folder with name tmp-(5 or 6 digit number). These files had zero bytes. I moved them to trash and the spinning lolipop problem seems solved. Thanks to all for your input.

There is another fix for this problem - Repair Permissions. If you have updated the OS or any applications recently, you will have become involved in the Permissions issue issue (?) the fix is to open Disc Utility and select Repair permissions from First Aid, having first selected your Start-up drive (usually MacHD) and if you see yards of repairs go through you will feel a lot better and so will Appleworks.

I've been having this problem for about three weeks now. It is, quite possibly, the most aggrivating thing in my life right now. I tried everything I could think of, including restoring the software, repairing the permissions, et cetera. Nothing worked. I use Appleworks quite a bit, so this was extremely annoying!

So I went to Apple.com and went to the Appleworks support area. Searched the help files, couldn't find anything. Eventually I clicked on the message board to rant about it (there probably would've been a lot of exclamation points involved), and lo and behold! The first topic listed was exactly my problem.

And the first reply, to delete the recent items, solved the problem. Essentially, this is a worthless post, but I am so excited that Appleworks is working again, that I had to do something. ;p

Seriously, this just made my month.

Welcome to Apple Discussions Megan

This is why the moderators were asked to make this post "sticky." This is probably the biggest problem in AppleWorks 6. In theory it should work, but it seems the code isn't complete & hasn't been fixed. I'm glad you found the post & let everyone know it worked.

Ok, I logged on, and in a matter of about 15 minutes figured out the problem to this "delay" bug in Apple works.
Of course I only figured it out after reading everyone's universal problem, and a few similar solutions...
This is what I did, and now my Appleworks is finally working..
I deleted my recent items, and autosave folders completely. That did the trick!!!!!!Hooray
Give it a go now...Carrie

There are now two Apple Knowledge Base articles on this subject:

] AppleWorks 6: Open Recent menu not showing the most recent items
] Clearing Recent Items can improve AppleWorks performance

Hi Dale, for the last week I've been struggling to open AppleWorks with no success, however, on searching the posts I came across your suggestion about going to recent items and dumping the alias's I found five in there and shoved them in the trash, now everything is perfect like nothing was ever wrong.
So, is it now OK to empty the trash ?

Many thanks, gedr.

Hi Gerald

You can delete the aliases in your Trash. They're only references/pointers/links to documents you've created in AppleWorks. (They're not the actual documents, in case you were wondering.)

I'm amazed that the 5 aliases in the folder slowed down your AppleWorks significantly!

The only reason for keeping some of them is to put them back into the Recent Items folder. By doing this they'd allow you to quickly open the documents they link to from within AppleWorks.

NB If you delete all the aliases, and later find out you would have liked to kept a few, you can recreate them by reopening and saving the original documents they linked to.

You should also consider how you can manage the aliases in the Recent Items folder so that they don't get out of hand. AppleWorks never deletes the aliases so it's up to you to do so. You have a few options that are explained in my Tips & Answers document, Recent Items - not visible/updated, eg turning off the Recent Items feature, manually deleting the aliases, deleting them using a couple of AppleScripts that are available, etc.

I also make an application for AppleWorks/Mac OS X called Sidekick that among other things manages the Recent Items.

Cheers

Dale

Disclaimer required by Apple:
"I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link."

I just wanted to say a big thank you to Dale Gillard (posting re the dreaded spinning ball in Appleworks). Following the detailed instructions in Dale's original post, I fixed the irritating 20 second delay in typing the next word !!.

It took hours of work before finally tracking down Dale's instructions - during which time I trashed the entire Appleworks programme and re-installed the lot (V6.2.9 for OSX). During this, I
ditched the whole Appleworks folder into the trash. The trash refused to 'empty' after installation, so could some kind soul please remind me how to 'force-empty' the trash. I know I have recently read how to do this but can't find the article giving the key strokes.

My original Appleworks V6 installation disc had an 'uninstall' option, but this was refused because by now I was using V6.2.9.

In view of this, could anyone suggest the correct way to uninstall completely any programme where the original software 'uninstall'
option fails to work.
Many thanks.
Lance UK.

Hello

To uninstall an application, the FIRST thing to do it to check that it is not running.
When this is done, trash every related files and bingo.
If you forgot to check that the app is not used before trashing it, you will be forced to re-boot to be able to empty the trash because the app will be considered as running.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE 19 décembre 2004 15:34:55)