Thursday, October 18, 2007

Leopard breaks AppleWorks, what about Classic

Leopard, aka OS X 10.5, breaks AppleWorks:
Macintouch: Leopard

....For anyone using AppleWorks, convert your files before you do the migration to Leopard. AppleWorks will not load in Leopard. Some files will open in iWork & Numbers, but others will even break the new programs. Large files seem to be the issue, and converting to Excel or Word formats before the upgrade would be a smart move..."
This is a bit surprising. I wonder what other OS X applications will break with 10.5.

I'm not too surprised though, Apple has always had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards breaking applications. Too bad they don't match that with support for old file formats -- including their own dam$%ed file formats.

Which reminds me -- I wonder if it breaks Classic? Classic won't run on Intel of course, but I run it on my G5 iMac with OS X 10.4.10. There's still not much in the way of children's games or educational software for OS X [1] -- and I sometimes fire up MORE 3.1 or FullWrite Professional to open old files.

Realistically, I should wait until February until I update my G5, or until iPhone 2.0 makes me update. January, after 10.5.1 and updates to Retrospect client and a bunch of other apps I rely on, will be when I update the MacBook.

Overall I'm looking forward to 10.5.1 however. There are many things on the feature list I really want (fully supported screen sharing, remote control, iChat, Apple's new version of "Outlook" called Mail.app, the signed application model, the memory map randomization, built-in PDF manipulation, better scanning support, etc, etc.) This looks like an upgrade for power users, developers, and for the support of good things to come.

[1] Really, there's not much in the way of interesting educational software or children's games on Windows either. That market basically went to Nintendo. There's more support for older software on XP than OS X though.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

After leopard 10.5.2,update with graphics update appleworks not only works but works better,. As do all the apps I had pulled off as not working under leopard
AOL,Which crashed under leopard now workd( Tiger version) appleworks , just about everything that didnt work originally now works
except of course classic

Mathmn said...

I've been using AppleWorks successfully with Leopard for quite some time. I'm running 10.5.5 and it still performs properly.

JGF said...

Yes, as another commenter it works following the 10.5.2 update.

I think the fonts look bad after 10.5.5 though. Did you notice any issues? I don't use AW much.

MotuIti said...

I too have been using AppleWorks with Leopard. Old habits are hard to outgrow. My main use is for the "core" of my web pages. I open a WP page add a table and save as HTML then copy and paste code other needed code.

What worries me the most is My old DB documents - name and address files, club membership listing with pictures of members. Guess I'll have to go with Filemaker pro for those when the time comes.

Maybe we'll get lucky and Apple will sell Appleworks to a third party (again) and beef it up a little. It could use multiple "Undo's"

"Word" is just too busy and overkill for me.