|
|
|
|
| Welcome, Guest | Home | Search | Login | Register | |
| Author | Ragtime - who is using / was using it ? (Read 15822 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
|
on: October 06, 2022, 09:31
Some of you may not be familiar with Ragtime at all! Especially if you don't hail from Europe, where it was the most popular. Ragtime is an office package with (limited) DTP capabilities. First of all, it's easy to get in and if you were a small business owner back in the early 90's, you could literally set up an invoice template in next to no time. A header, possibly with your logo, some body text and a table - even have the table do calculcation on the final pricing including VAT. The whole thing was "frame-based" and easy to grasp. Because word processing and spreadsheet were essentially interwoven in Ragtime (instead of individual modules), it was used by a lot of these small businesses for all their office work. That was the biggest strength of Ragtime - being this one go-to solution. It could even do some graphical representation of entered data, e.g. a chart showing entered numbers / statistics. It struggled when it came to "power usage" of one part though. Like word processing. While you can use Ragtime 3 to e.g. write a college paper with an index and foot notes, it gets complicated, needing work-arounds and always felt a bit quirky to me. They fixed that in later versions, but those had their own problems. Also one thing I distinctly remember as irritating me already back then was that Ragtime 3 wouldn't allow me to select text beyond one page. Have fun copy + pasting a section within your 20 page document! Ragtime 3 was a legend here in Germany. It was *wildly* successful. According to maker B&E, it sold about 100.000 units of Ragtime 3.x in Germany. Given the German Macintosh market during the 90's was always small by comparison and Apple Germany estimated its user base to be at around 200.000 Macs, that means nearly every second German Mac user had bought a version of Ragtime 3.x at one point during the 90s! Found the German and dutch version on the Mac Garden for download. Couldn't locate an English version though? Anyone got it? http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ragtime-32-privat Ragtime's popularity faded with the years, both due to MS Office success, Apple bundling ClarisWorks/AppleWorks and the fact that B&E made some grave mistakes with Ragtime 4 and 5, resulting in it being much less accessible. (which used to be one of its main strength) B&E sacrificed some GUI features that were actually really good for no actual gain with v4, changed keystrokes people had been used to for almost a decade and so on. Which led many users to cling on their beloved Ragtime 3.2 for as long as possible instead of upgrading to 4 and 5. But that's a a different topic. Anyone been using it? Somebody else with hands-on experience to share? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Last Edit: October 29, 2022, 14:02 by Bolkonskij
|
68040
|
512 MB  Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #1 on: October 06, 2022, 13:47
|
I tried to work with Ragtime but stopped for a few simple yet basic reasons: 1) Its DTP abilities just couldn't convince. Implementing a bit of this and that might have been nice in the days of novelty, but in hindsight we have QuarkXPress and Adobe Premiere and others that do the job right - and not just half assed. 2) I was never able to get data exchanged between Ragtime and other other tools. Neither MS-Word, WordPress or RTF format truly did it - and specially that last one is an absolute must if you want to produce files the outside world can understand. 3) Maybe its a B-II specific issue, but the damn thing wouldn't run stable with large document sizes (containing multi-MB images). It croaked a bit too often for my taste. Aaand - even so its supposed to be a German SW product - I never managed to get that German spell checker working right. Back in them days you had limited choice, both in terms of available hardware as well as affordable software. But now that we can compare all possibilities on an equal footing I just find Ragtime lacking on too many fronts. Its halfway there, but halfway across the finish line doesn't count. I left it installed, just in case I might find some use for it after all. But as of now it wouldn't be my prime pick for any specific task.
Last Edit: October 06, 2022, 13:49 by 68040
|
wove
|
1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #2 on: October 06, 2022, 14:12
|
Ragtime Solo was distributed on a magazine CD in US. I do not think it ever gained any traction but that might because it came to our shores late in the game. There is some discussion of it in the forums in 2007. Search will show up the old posts about it. As far as I know it never gained any traction in the US. I played around with it a bit, but being so late to the game it did not stand a chance of unseating ClarisWorks for my daily work.
|
cballero
|
1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #3 on: October 06, 2022, 21:46
|
Well, ClarisWorks was cemented as the go-to software, especially for homes and schools, especially when Apple started offering nicely-priced special educational market bundles that included Macs like the Color Classic, ClarisWorks, TrueType fonts and the StyleWriter II. The tight integration of the OS (like QuickDraw technologies), powerful and easy-to-use software (like ClarisWorks and TrueType) and hardware (like their StyleWriter inkjet printers) made the creative design and output phenomenal without cannibalizing their high-end software market (at least too much).
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #4 on: October 28, 2022, 01:11
|
Quote from: Bolkonskij: who had mused... "Couldn't locate an English version though? Anyone got it?"Not version 3, but at the Mac Garden, there is the English RagTime 4.1 a full installation disk set for both 68k and PPC, it installs to System 7.0 and above. You are given the option when installing, to install RagTime 3 style menus. Perhaps this could be a good compromise until an actual version 3 surfaces. I only discovered this one today when looking for RagTime copies and happened to read the fine manual from that MG page. It actually looks like a good DTP program for System 7 (yet to try it on 8 too).
Last Edit: October 28, 2022, 01:16 by MTT
|
Knezzen
|
Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #5 on: October 28, 2022, 20:23
|
Microsoft Office was and is the king in Sweden, regardless of platform. Never used Ragtime at all, but I will surely give it a try!
|
cballero
|
1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #6 on: October 28, 2022, 22:20
|
I also used Word 4 in college on System 6 on a floppy swapping out the system here or there.. man, those were the days!! 
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #7 on: October 29, 2022, 08:05
|
I've since installed and tested RagTime 4.1 as working OK on Mini vMac II (7.1.1), Basilisk II (7.6.1 & 8.1), SheepShaver (9.0.4) and a Centris 660av (7.1.1). The only negative is on Mini vMac II with 8MB RAM max, there's no room left to swing a cat in.  All up it's pretty nice on a classic Mac system. I also located (via the Web Archive) German, German (CH), & French copies of 4.1 and added them to the MG page linked above. With thanks to Cashed for the clue as to what "CH" meant. 
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #8 on: January 23, 2024, 04:16
|
Quote from: Bolkonskij: "...Couldn't locate an English version though? Anyone got it?"Located a copy of RagTime 3.04 US English. Demo only as the screenshot shows, although it seems to be fully functional. Maybe it's time crippled. Only stumbled across this one via the MG, yesterday. I'll play with it for a while (haven't tried printing as yet), saving documents is OK. If anyone wants to install it, it's on this Apple Internal CD image: "Apple_RP_Lib_Internal_v5.0.iso" (DL #5 on this page) - 637+MB. BTW this US copy is from 1990, so my tests so far have been on System 6 only. Will get around to testing in 7 shortly. [Edit] Installs and runs in System 7.x, fine. Found the limitation (at least one of them anyway) The demo prints a page sized "X" across any page you print  One for MG's Sidd to look at perhaps?
Last Edit: January 23, 2024, 06:17 by MTT
|
Bolkonskij
|
Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #9 on: January 23, 2024, 07:15
|
Absolutely, an "unlocked" version would be a good addition to the Garden! I think we used to use it with System 7.0 or 7.1 and it ran fine. Like I wrote above, this is a legendary piece in European Macintosh history :-) ... a rather inexpensive Mac LC II and Ragtime 3 was the combo for office back in 1993 ;-)
|
cballero
|
1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #10 on: June 19, 2025, 05:19
|
Well, the wait's finally over, gang! and yes Mike, you finally got Sidd to crack that software safe for us again!  It's download number 6 on the RagTime page and its only slight caveat being that it only runs on North American English Mac OSes  Now to find 3.2 lol
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #11 on: June 19, 2025, 07:16
|
What, the RagTime v3.0 Demo? No, I was busy with other things and had completely forgotten to ask Sidd about it. But the other day I was rummaging about in compilation CD's for something totally unrelated, as you do, when I spotted an updater install set for RagTime v3.1|7 (no, that isn't a typo). It was complete, except it required a copy of the earlier v3.1 to be pre-installed on the hardware you wanted to install it onto. Not having a v3.1 copy, the updater set was uploaded to the MG and I asked Sidd if he could take a look at it, which he did, and of course he being the miracle classic Macintosh software savant that he is, found a fix and uploaded it the next day. The MG has been wanting an English version 3 copy since 2013. So this has been a good find.
Last Edit: June 19, 2025, 07:26 by MTT
|
cballero
|
1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #12 on: June 19, 2025, 15:42
|
Ha! Isn't that just like life though? I can still remember seeing a Powerbook 100 for the first time, a tiny yet heavy for its diminutive size 5 pound wonder, and just shaking my head at its 68k chip, 2MB RAM base and packing either a 20 or 40 MB hard drive, its innovative RAM startup process and SCSI disk mode made for some zippy boot and file transfers! I wonder if such clever and popular programs like RagTime 3 ever made its way into one of those portable mini wonders and how it might have performed? (bearing in mind that the P100's 640x400 1-bit passive LCD screen was like the compact Macs, from the 128k to the SE and Classic) its 16MHz 68HC000 processor was only shared with the Mac Portable, crazy cool! RagTime Update: and for anyone who wants to try it, the 3.17 version's been updated, by Sidd and it now works region-free!
Last Edit: June 20, 2025, 10:37 by cballero
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #13 on: June 21, 2025, 03:09
|
Quote from: cbone: "I wonder if such clever and popular programs like RagTime 3 ever made its way into one of those portable mini wonders and how it might have performed?I don't see why it couldn't have, both are of the same vintage, and RT3 runs fine in mono displays, Mac SSW 6 and 7, so that wouldn't have been a barrier to it. You know it would have made a world of difference (to running Mac OS on a 68000 CPU) if those other mono Mac's could have accessed 8MB of RAM like the PB100 could. And Sidd!! wow. Now A Mac's regional language is no barrier for what he's managed to achieve with it. It will of course always remain an English version with English menus and US dictionary, but now it runs in any language version of the Mac OS.
|
|
Pages: [1]
|
| ||||||||||||||
|
© 2021 System7Today.com. |
