Bob Hearn, co-author of ClarisWorks (and the excellent AppleWorks GS), has written a brief history of the program. Although I preferred BeagleWorks to ClarisWorks 1.0, ClarisWorks 4 is one of my all-time favorite applications.
In its effort to produce slick, bug-free software, Claris was neglecting the hard reality that sheer number of features sells, independent of elegance of design. Some products, such as MacWrite Pro, were delayed so long by stringent quality assurance requirements that they lost their effectiveness in the market.
Update (2020-08-17): See also: Hacker News.
Update (2022-07-22): See this updated link (via Thomas Brand).
Apple II AppleWorks GS ClarisWorks History Mac Mac App
I’ve been looking for a new search engine for ATPM, and right now the leading candidate is SWISH-E. Here are some of the reasons I like it:
- It can index PDF documents if you have Xpdf installed. This is especially important for ATPM because our older content is not available in HTML format.
- It can build its index using a Web spider rather than by scanning the local file system. That way, it can also index the dynamic content of the pages.
- I can tell it not to index certain parts of the pages, e.g. the table of contents in the navigation bar.
- I can tell it not to index URLs that match particular patterns. For instance, the printing versions of the pages have URLs that end with “?print” and should not be indexed.
- It has good documentation and examples.
- It can be installed without logging in as root or writing to any directories outside $HOME.
There are many free search engines, but ones that have this combination of features are rare (judging from my quick search). Installation took a while, as I had to first install libxml2 and Xpdf, and then wrestle with why SWISH-E couldn’t find pdftotext or pdfinfo even though they were in the path. Once installed, it seems to work well. By tomorrow it should be done indexing, and then I can try some real tests.
