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.