achey stomach - check
headache - check
achey throat /neck - check
sore eyes - check
cough - check
sneezing - check
runny eyes - check
sore throat - nope
inability to sleep - check
mild laryngitis - check
runny nose - nope
fatigue - check
muscle aches - nope
So essentially the symptoms I usually get in the winter when I have a cold--sore throat, runny nose and muscle aches--are missing from this summer bug, but I have everything else. I've been staying in bed trying out software on my new MacBookPro. I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to Photoshop CS3 while I can...before they don't allow upgrades from version 7 anymore (like they did with Illustrator...the latest version I have is 9, and the cutoff for upgrades is 10...I have to buy a whole new damn CS3 version! Damn!!!!)
I felt really awful Tuesday night as we listened to the Democratic Convention on the radio in the bedroom. I haven't even felt like getting up and going to the living room and watching TV...OD'd on that during the Olympics. Yesterday I felt fairly good in the morning and got a lot done and thought we could go for a bike ride, but by the time Stan got home I was lying flat in bed again. So I used that time to download a demo of iWorks. iWorks has taken the place of Appleworks since about 2005 when they stopped supporting AW and have taken off all mention of it from their site, other than stating they don't support it.
Gone are the Paint and Draw modules that came w/AW. No big loss...they were like MacPaint and MacDraw from 1985 (which I used a lot during my free time at Kinko's)...I mean, it would be silly for me to use those apps now except to affect 80s computer art. Gone also is the Database module. Now *that* will be sorely missed. I used that every day as a checkbook transaction tracker and I kept track of all my sales and expenditures for tax records. iWork has no equivalent database program.
AW's Presentation module (which I never used) is now iWork's Keynote which looks a lot slicker, and from what I read, blows MS's PowerPoint out of the water. I don't know if I'd use it, but maybe I could figure out how to make SWFs of art or jewelry or something. I don't make presentations (images of polyester suited people with briefcases, pointers, and pie charts), but maybe something automatic and artistic for the web might be nice since I never really could figure out Flash much and never upgraded past version 4 (too technical).
AW's word processing module is now iWork's Pages, and AW's spreadsheet is now iWork's Numbers. I made use of AW's spreadsheet in a most unusual way. Visit any of my jewelry pages, either my main page or the pages on the left navigation bar (not the individual item pages). The listings of jewelry items with the thumbnails was all done with with AW's spreadsheet. It was so easy to organize jewelry listings that way, shuffle and sort items, alphabetize long lists, delete sold items and add new items. It would have been hell to do that in BBEdit (my HTML program of choice...yes, I raw code, can you believe it?), so I just constructed a sort of "container" page with Server Side Includes and have the included content in the spreadsheet. When it came time add the new content, I'd just make my changes on the spreadsheet and export it out as ASCII text. Unfortunately, I found out quickly that wasn't too clean as it put in tabs between columns. So after the export I had to open it up in BBEdit and clear out the tabs. I know, kind of cludgey, but it was the only way I knew to deal with it, and it was certainly much more efficient and error-free than if I would've created the whole list of items into one BBEdit HTML file. That would have been a nightmare trying to sort out. I know there's database (Filemaker?) programs out there that can probably do that automatically, but I have absolutely no idea how to run anything like that on my server, and no one to show me how either. I thought this was rather ingenious that I figured out as much using AppleWorks's Spreadsheet.
With System OS X 10.5 and our new Intel-based Macs, Appleworks is showing signs of breaking. Nothing major, but when I try to export an ASCII file as .txt, it won't add the .txt or it adds two periods, or something weird. Not as smooth a workflow as I'd like. That's why I wanted to check out iWorks. But iWorks' Numbers, despite many improvements, doesn't export TXT files. It doesn't even export RTF (Rich Text). Just PDF, CSV and XLS. PDF is worthless...it's graphical, not text. And either CSV or XLS put in a whole bunch of commas and quoted everything that cannot be removed with one quick search and replace in BBEdit. It does import my old AppleWorks spreadsheets nicely, however. Exporting is another matter. But I'll get to that later. Then I figured out that iWork's Pages *can* export plain text. I cobbled together a spreadsheet-like table setup in Pages that worked fairly well and exported clean text (except for tabs...face it, if you have tabular data, tabs are a fact of life in exported table text). But it wasn't...right. I kept having to adjust the height of the rows when I added and deleted data. It didn't look as neat and clean as a real spreadsheet.
Then I was playing around this morning with Numbers and found out I could have multiple spreadsheets in one document! I have a couple dozen spreadsheets for my jewelry content...that would be convenient to have them all in one file. Then I also figured out that I could select a spreadsheet and copy/paste it into BBEdit. It copies it clean (with tabs, of course...no getting around that) with none of that gunky comma quote CSV/XLS garbage. How sweet is that? I can already use pre-existing BBEdit text files...just delete the existing content and cut/paste from Numbers the new content...that way I don't have to create a new text file and accidentally misname it, search/replace tabs and voila! That even sounds BETTER than the individual spreadsheets with AppleWorks and the exporting. Fewer steps, fewer files.
Now as far as the checkbook register and income and expenditures tax info lists that we use AW's Database for...I downloaded a simple transaction tracker template that works in Numbers. Nothing fancy, but it WORKS, and I guess that's the point of the aptly named software, huh? $99 for a family pack so we can both use it on our laptops...not bad. Sure beats the price of a Photoshop Upgrade.
Labels: Graphics and Software, This Boring Life
3 Comments:
24 individual Appleworks Spreadsheet Files: 2.3 Megabytes
1 Numbers Spreadsheet File containing 20 Sheets and 24 Tables, essentially all the information in the 24 Appleworks files: 272 Kilobytes.
Wow. Not that space is such an issue as it used to be, but still.
Get well soon getwellsoon we want you to get well. Get well soon wewantyou togetwell.
Seems like soft ware is going through a very dry logical, but uninspired and uncreative period in history.
Maybe, the geeks are forgetting the right side of their brains when they develop software.
That is definitely true as far as graphic software goes. Ever since Metatools got bought out and became business development management workflow solutions or whatever it became.
All the new plugins now are geared toward photo enhancement, none toward generating fun new effects for creating more imaginative, non-literal art.
Sign of the times. The heydey of creative graphic apps was the 90s. In the 00s, it lost its innovativity (I made that word up...nothing else worked). I think it's an apt metaphor for the political times.
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