On Oct 29, at 1:11 PM, Harry Jacobson-Beyer wrote:
1) would Appleworks continue to work in future versions of the OS - theanswers ranged from I don't know to probably not.
I don't know how long it will continue to work, but you can make your own judgement from the history of the port over to Mac OS X.
Back when Apple was preparing Mac OS X, they announced that programs could run in three modes: Classic, Carbon and Cocoa. You might remember the charts with three boxes that used to show on the big screen behind the Stevenotes.
Classic is basically a sandboxed version of Mac OS 9 running under Mac OS X so all the older programs would continue to work. It was discontinued with Leopard.
Cocoa is the native Mac OS X programming interface that was inherited from NeXTSTEP and it continues to be enhanced. All new programs are written using the Cocoa programming interface because they can then take advantage of all the new features of the operating system. The Cocoa programs have also run faster from the very first version of Mac OS X.
Carbon was written as a transitional programming interface. It contains Mac OS X versions of the standard programming routines from Mac OS 9. It was included in the original Mac OS X to make it easier for Mac programmers to port their programs into Mac OS X. At the time it was announced, Apple made it clear they thought Carbon was an ugly wart on the nose of Mac OS X and would be going away.
As demonstrations of Carbon, Apple released two sacrificial lambs: Finder and Appleworks. The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, has a completely Cocoa Finder, but apparently still supports the Carbon interface. (It does drop support for non-Intel Macs.)
Apple has not touched the Appleworks code in about ten years and clearly does not intend a Cocoa re-write. So, Appleworks will apparently still run in Snow Leopard, but the handwriting on the wall is getting clearer.
PS/ I stopped using Appleworks many years ago because it has so many annoying bugs with fonts and the clipboard. It was pretty clear these would never be fixed. I now use NeoOffice for most of my office-type stuff.
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