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I’ve written an entire novel (seriously!) in this program, and it’s a beautiful experience.
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It doesn’t have a full screen mode, it doesn’t let you generate charts from an attached Excel spreadsheet, it doesn’t let you export a webpage, it doesn’t have thirty-seven different newsletter templates, it doesn’t make coffee, it doesn’t offer next-day shipping on purchases over $100, it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t get in your way. Pretty much the only thing you can use this program to do is type words. No multimedia here, no fine-grained control over typeface features (if only because there weren’t any fine-grained typeface features), no nothing that didn’t need to be there.
Writeroom floating window for mac#
It was the culmination of six years of Mac Word versions (version 1 and 3 there was no Word 2 for Mac because it skipped version numbers to match up with the DOS version), a minimalist interface with just enough window chrome to let you align text, pick a font, space your lines-do the simple things you need to do when composing a document. The One True (Microsoft) WordĪccording to this Wired piece, Microsoft Word 5.1 came out in October of 1991. This is the first point at which word processors started mirroring the increasing complexity and distraction of computing environments in general, and the point at which I started having trouble using them for writing. It was at this point that “standard word processors” stopped being minimal and work-oriented and started pandering to mothers making sixth-grade-class newsletters. Around the end of the Classic era, 1 Microsoft came out with Office 98, which was an awful abortion, but it was also a direct result of a terrible moment in Macintosh history: the replacement of Word 5 by Word 6.
There were contemporaries to AppleWorks, though. It mostly stays out of the way, except it’s so limited in its capabilities as to be an exercise in masochism. The whole thing feels weird in a way that ClarisWorks didn’t, because it doesn’t fit with either user interface because it’s trying to fit with both.
Laptops looked like toilet seats (God bless ‘em) and fonts in AppleWorks looked like garbage. But if you look at it, actually look at the way the words look on the page, everything is “off.” It’s a time warp to that weird period in Mac history where our computers were weird bright colors and ran two operating systems at the same time (usually 9.2.2 and Jaguar, although 8.5 was still floating around). I still have a copy of AppleWorks installed on my MacBook Pro, and occasionally I’ll fire it up and try to rip out page after page of derivative, syntactically-horrific prose the same way I did when I was seven. When Apple killed its Claris subsidiary, ClarisWorks was rebranded as AppleWorks and a new version was released. I even tried to wrap my head around Publishers, which were a weird feature I still don’t understand.
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I knew how to do everything ClarisWorks could do. I was a writer, the world’s youngest important author. I spent hour after hour writing “books” - usually twenty pages or so of fiction, or, well, a seven-year-old’s idea of fiction - and printing them out, reading them to my parents and to myself and to anyone else who would listen.
We had a Performa 578 running System 7.5.5, and ClarisWorks was all I had. The first word processor I ever used seriously for any amount of time was ClarisWorks 2.1. Kevin is a native Memphian, a killer musician and a great writer. Longtime reader may remember that Kevin is the guy I bought this domain name from. Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by friend Kevin Lipe, after a discussion over beer and pizza about writing on the Mac, and how it has changed over the years.
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