Farewell, my dear friend.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve used Appleworks. I loved appleworks. It was simple enough, it ran smoothly. It had this great, great feature where you could indent and un-indent and all that stuff with just a few simple buttons. Nothing complicated. When I was younger than ten even, I remember drawing pictures on Appleworks (since windows painting wasn’t out yet).
I am the appleworks queen. I know everything there is to know about appleworks, besides the guy who programed it, but it’s so old he’s probably dead or something. :) I made resumes. I made overhead pictures for worship. I made cards. I made posters. I pretty much made everything on appleworks.
However… recently appleworks has been doing two things on me. First, it’s been eating my documents. It actually ate one of mine completely. A whole, actually rather difficult section to write, of a story. It’s also eaten a day or so of notes from a class. They just disappear.
Secondly, and more consistently as of late, it’s been quitting. I ask it to do a spell check and it just quits. Or save something and instead it quits.
Moreover, I’m getting a lot of teachers annoyed at me because I need to submit all my assignments in PDFs. I don’t have Word. I HATE Word. They want me to submit them in Word format. Moreover, when I try saving them as an RTF file, someone said it didn’t work. Maybe it’s user error; I don’t know. The fact is that it’s getting to the point no one can read appleworks files, even if I do save them as RTFs.
As such, and with great sadness, I am saying farewell to appleworks. I won’t delete it yet. I still will probably need it for drawing or something. I don’t know. But all of my new documetns, and all of the documents that I am working on, will be now going into Bean 2.4.4.
This is scary. I mean, after all, I don’t know what Bean is going to do. I don’t know if it’ll hurt my poor documents or not. I can’t handle another word processor that eats my stories. Then, how do I do headers? Or footers? Or other things that are valuable but I can’t think about right now?
On the other hand, I don’t have a choice. My brother, whose opinion I trust, recommend Bean as a simple, basic word processor. Nothing fancy but enough to get the job done. I hope so.
On the plus side, Bean has this notes feature that is awesome! I’m so excited. I even created a shortcut that will allow me to go cmd-M and mark up my document. So, say, I’m tired and I’m reading a story, I can just go, cmd-M, [this is really dull] and it is done. So overall, I’m pleased with my computer performance today.
Typing is Vital
Since so much of writing is typing, it seems appropriate that writers have a clue about how fast they can type. I don’t think this is as important in the sense that the faster you can type, the faster you can whip out books. It’s more that the faster you can type, the better your hands can keep up with your head.
That being said here’s a fun little distraction for you to practice your typing. OH, and you just keep typing the next word; don’t bother with hitting return.
Sorry about the sporadic posting this week. I was painting my room and that left time for about nothing, including anything computer related.
Abigail
always a writer 