A discussion over at Macintouch led me to the OS X beta of Ragtime, an integrated app available as a free (but big — 54 MB) download. I’ve downloaded it and will be evaluating it.
4 thoughts on “Ragtime”
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A discussion over at Macintouch led me to the OS X beta of Ragtime, an integrated app available as a free (but big — 54 MB) download. I’ve downloaded it and will be evaluating it.
Comments are closed.
So I take it “integrated app” means it’s an office suite. Or did I get that wrong?
Here in the Solaris world I’ve been using StarOffice. I see it’s available for Linux and Windows but not the Mac. Nor is it freeware, as I’d thought — it’s free for educational institutions (which covers me) but has a modest price for other environments.
StarOffice 5.2 for Solaris is s-l-o-w but it does pretty much work, something which never fails to astonish me. I mean, what are the odds? I haven’t heard whether 6.0 is zippier.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0/
Oh, yes, and I have yet to get comment spam but I get referrer log spam (!) all the time. 🙁
Actually, Ragtime is more like Appleworks and its ilk–you draw frames on your page to contain text, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.
I actually imported a hellaciously complex Japanese-language Word doc into it. It did a good job on the text, had problems with the placed images (as does my copy of Word, to be fair), and mucked up some of the super-complex tables (which contain merged and split cells). The interface is kinda wacky (partly because it is translated from German), but it works.
Ragtime was available for the Macintosh about a hundred years ago — well, in 1987 or 1988 anyway (it was the first German software I’d encountered). I have a feeling it might have been a desktop publishing app then but I could be wrong. Hard to forget the name, though. Interesting, given the existence of StarOffice/OpenOffice, that people keep trying to come up with an alternative to MS Office. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.