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48-598: MacWrite is a discontinued WYSIWYG word processor released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. Together with MacPaint , it was one of the two original " killer applications " that propelled the adoption and popularity of the GUI in general, and the Mac in particular. MacWrite was spun off to Claris , which released a major update in 1989 as MacWrite II . A further series of improvements produced 1993's MacWrite Pro , but further improvements were few and far between. By

96-401: A companion product, SmartForm Assistant, software to fill forms created by SmartForm Designer. In 1994, Claris published Amazing Animation , software aimed at children and young teenagers, allowing them to produce their own short animated films. In 1995, Claris purchased and released Claris Home Page , which enjoyed popularity as one of the few truly GUI -based WYSIWYG HTML editors of

144-465: A cost not much higher than MacWrite alone—a bundle that Claris did not match. Claris did offer ClarisWorks, an all-in-one package; and, while the price was right, ClarisWorks was very limited and could not compete in the business market. Microsoft also released a Works package. Microsoft's domination of the Macintosh office suite software marketplace would be replicated five years later when (following

192-495: A cross-platform version of FileMaker for both the Mac and Windows; except for a few platform-specific functions, the program's features and user interface were the same. Up to this point FileMaker had no real relational capabilities; it was limited to automatically looking up and importing values from other files. It only had the ability to save a state—a filter and a sort, and a layout for the data. Version 3.0, released around 1995, introduced new relational and scripting features. By

240-499: A more modern and common user interface. The result was the "Pro" series: MacDraw Pro, MacWrite Pro, and FileMaker Pro. In order to provide a complete office suite they later purchased the rights to the Informix Wingz spreadsheet on the Mac, rebranding it as Claris Resolve , and added the new presentation program Claris Impact . The series was released piecemeal over a period of about two years, during which period Microsoft

288-462: A problem to Apple : the Mac was planned to be launched in 1983, with a new user interface paradigm , but no third-party software would be available for it, nor could users easily write their own. Users would end up with a computer that did nothing. In order to fill this void, several members of the Mac team took it upon themselves to write simple applications to fill these roles until third-party developers published more full-fledged software. The result

336-456: A relationship with many Apple employees, many of whom were on the Macintosh development team. He agreed to lead the MacWrite development team on a semi-official basis. Before it was released, MacWrite was known as "Macintosh WP" (Word Processor) and "MacAuthor". Allegedly, Steve Jobs was not convinced of his team's abilities, and secretly commissioned another project just to be sure; its development

384-452: A template-based database application with a leaning toward information from other applications. Bento was discontinued on September 30, 2013. During DevCon 2019, the developers' conference, FileMaker announced it was resurrecting the Claris name and re-branding commenced. FileMaker Inc. changed its name to Claris International. The FileMaker product name remains as Claris FileMaker. FileMaker

432-420: A thesaurus. The result was a suite of products that all look and work the same way, and are able to read and write each other's formats. The resulting MacWrite Pro, released in early 1993, was a major upgrade from previous versions. Reviewers almost universally praised the new release as offering all the required tools while still being very easy to use. However, development had been slow; one developer claimed it

480-409: A word processing program. MacWrite established the conventions for a GUI -based word processor, with such features as a toolbar for selecting paragraph formatting options, font and style menus, and a ruler for tabs, margins, and indents. Similar word processors followed, including the first GUI version of Microsoft Word and WriteNow, which addressed many of MacWrite's limitations while adhering to much

528-418: Is a cross-platform relational database application. It integrates a database engine with a graphical user interface ( GUI ) and security features, allowing users to modify the database by dragging new elements into layouts, screens, or forms. It started as an MS-DOS app called Nutshell, developed by Nashoba Systems. In the late 1980s, Claris began a major upgrade effort, rewriting all of its products to use

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576-457: The Weekly Reader advertised its Stickybear educational software with the slogan "what you see is what you get", with photographs of its Apple II graphics, but home computers of the 1970s and early 1980s lacked the sophisticated graphics capabilities necessary to display WYSIWYG documents, meaning that such applications were usually confined to limited-purpose, high-end workstations (such as

624-605: The HP 1000 minicomputer, taking advantage of HP 2640 —HP's first bitmapped computer terminal. BRUNO was then ported to the HP-3000 and re-released as "HP Draw". By 1981, MicroPro advertised that its WordStar word processor had WYSIWYG, but its display was limited to displaying styled text in WYSIWYG fashion; bold and italic text would be represented on screen, instead of being surrounded by tags or special control characters . In 1983,

672-590: The IBM Displaywriter System ) that were too expensive for the general public to afford. As improving technology allowed the production of cheaper bitmapped displays, WYSIWYG software started to appear in more popular computers, including LisaWrite for the Apple Lisa , released in 1983, and MacWrite for the Apple Macintosh , released in 1984. The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that

720-469: The classic Mac OS , but few other problems were addressed. Things changed in the later 1980s with the introduction of MacWrite II. The main changes for this release were an updated user interface, a number of new "style" capabilities, and the inclusion of Claris' file translator technology, XTND . MacWrite II was the first really new version of the software, and was based on a word processing engine purchased from Quark, Inc. By 1989 Word already dominated

768-475: The possibility of upgrades. Eventually Apple decided the only solution was to spin off the products to a third party of its own creation, forming Claris in 1987. Claris was also given the rights to several lesser-known Apple products such as MacProject , MacDraw , and the hit Apple II product AppleWorks . Claris' second corporate headquarters (nicknamed "The Wedge") was in Santa Clara , about six miles from

816-556: The relational database program FileMaker . The FileMaker Platform is available for the macOS , Microsoft Windows and iOS operating systems and is aimed towards business users and power users. In the early days of the Mac , Apple shipped the machines with two basic programs, MacWrite and MacPaint, so that users would have a working machine "out of the box". However, this resulted in complaints from third-party developers, who felt that these programs were good enough for so many users that there

864-459: The screen resolution and the resolution of the ImageWriter dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus, the scale and dimensions of the on-screen display in programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printed output. If the paper were held up to the screen, the printed image would be the same size as

912-418: The typographic unit ) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers . When the text was laid out on the screen, 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed, 300 PPI files were used. As a result, one would occasionally find characters and words that are slightly off—a problem that would continue up to this day. Bravo was released commercially, and

960-616: The Mac OS to them. Many of the developers refused to move to Claris, leading to a serious split in development that delayed future releases of both products. The Mac OS was soon returned to Apple; HyperCard was ignored for a time, before also returning briefly as a part of the QuickTime group. In 1988, Claris published Claris CAD , a 2-D CAD package, and Claris Graphics Translator, a translation package for Claris CAD. In early 1989, Claris published SmartForm Designer, software to design forms, and

1008-621: The Mac and GUIs in general. MacWrite's inclusion with the Macintosh discouraged developers from creating other word processing software for the computer. Apple unbundled the software with the introduction of the Macintosh Plus, requiring customers to purchase it for the first time. Strong sales continued, and Apple eventually let MacWrite and MacPaint languish with no development resources assigned to improving them. Unfortunately this plan backfired. Users flooded Apple with complaints, demanding newer versions that would keep pace with new features in

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1056-437: The Mac with about 60% market share, but the introduction of MacWrite II changed things dramatically; by 1990 Word had dropped to about 45% of the market, and MacWrite had risen to about 30%. This seemed to demonstrate that it would be worth developing further, but Claris did not respond quickly with updated versions. Microsoft, on the other hand, did, and soon introduced Word 4.0. MacWrite's share once again started to erode. In

1104-551: The Mac, while at the same time developers flooded Apple with complaints about there being any possibility of an upgrade. Apple finally decided the only solution was to spin off the products as a separate company, Claris . Claris formed in 1987 and re-released the existing versions of the Apple products under their own name. Initially it seemed Claris was as uninterested in developing MacWrite as Apple had been. Several minor upgrades were released to allow MacWrite to run on newer versions of

1152-459: The PC world at the time. Thus, while a Macintosh 15-inch (38 cm) monitor had the same 640 × 480 resolution as a PC, a 16-inch (41 cm) screen would be fixed at 832 × 624 rather than the 800 × 600 resolution used by PCs. With the introduction of third-party dot-matrix printers as well as laser printers and multisync monitors, resolutions deviated from even multiples of

1200-400: The adoption of WYSIWYG techniques, text appeared in editors using the system standard typeface and style with little indication of layout ( margins , spacing , etc.). Users were required to enter special non-printing control codes (now referred to as markup code tags ) to indicate that some text should be in boldface , italics , or a different typeface or size. In this environment there

1248-469: The company divested itself of all but its flagship product, and reformed as FileMaker Inc. In 2019, FileMaker Inc. announced at DevCon that it was restoring the Claris brand name. Also in 2019, Claris acquired Italian startup, Stamplay, a cloud-based integration platform which connects web services like Dropbox and Slack without writing code, and announced they would rename their product offering as Claris Connect. The company develops, supports and markets

1296-535: The last Nashoba version. Several minor versions followed; it was succeeded by FileMaker Pro 1.0 in 1990. In the meantime, development began on major overhauls of their entire product line, including FileMaker. Each of these would be eventually released as part of the Pro series of products. In 1990, Apple decided that Claris should remain a wholly owned subsidiary , as opposed to being completely spun off in an initial public offering . The company president soon left, and over

1344-408: The late 1980s, Claris started a massive upgrade series to produce the "Pro" line of products. The main change would be to integrate all of their products with a consistent GUI based on that of FileMaker . This included a common toolbar running down the left side of the screen, and a number of standardized tool palettes. In addition, the Pro series also used common international spelling dictionaries and

1392-462: The main Apple campus. At first Claris provided only trivial upgrades, limited to making the products continue to run on newer versions of the Macintosh operating system . In 1988, Claris purchased FileMaker from Nashoba Systems and quickly released a rebranded version called FileMaker II, to conform to its naming scheme for other products, such as MacWrite II. The product, however, changed little from

1440-459: The mid-1990s it appeared to most observers that Apple was in serious danger of disappearing. The main ClarisWorks development team left Claris, disillusioned with the product and the market, and founded Gobe Software , which produced a Claris-like office suite for BeOS . Facing declining sales, Claris management decided that FileMaker was the only product worth keeping, and put all of the rest of

1488-426: The mid-1990s, MacWrite was no longer a serious contender in the word processing market, development ended around 1995, and it was completely discontinued in 1998 due to dwindling sales. When the Mac was first being created, it was clear that users would interact with it differently from other personal computers. Typical computers of the era booted into text-only disk operating system or BASIC environments, requiring

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1536-642: The mid-1990s. The word-processing module of AppleWorks was very similar to MacWrite Pro. While it was written entirely from scratch, it retained some of the design limitations of MacWrite Pro. However, later versions of AppleWorks are unable to read older MacWrite Pro files. In a survey of five Macintosh word processors, Compute!'s Apple Applications in 1987 wrote that "once a bold pioneer, MacWrite now seems frozen in time ... it lags behind other word processors in power and responsiveness, and it's clearly unsuited for outlining, layout, and other advanced tasks". Citations Bibliography WYSIWYG Before

1584-504: The next year most of the other executives followed. That same year Claris also purchased an integrated application written by two former Claris employees. After rebranding in a style similar to FileMaker, MacDraw, and MacWrite, it was released in 1991 as ClarisWorks , and became another huge success for the company. After a lengthy series of ups and downs, this product was eventually taken back by Apple in 1998 and rebranded as AppleWorks (for Macintosh). In September 1992, Claris released

1632-457: The on-screen image, but at twice the resolution. As the ImageWriter was the only model of printer physically compatible with the Macintosh printer port, this created an effective closed system. Later, when Macs using external displays became available, the resolution was fixed to the size of the screen to achieve 72 DPI. These resolutions often differed from the VGA-standard resolutions common in

1680-618: The phrase: Many variations are used only to illustrate a point or make a joke, and have very limited real use. Some that have been proposed include the following: Claris Claris International Inc. , formerly FileMaker Inc. , is a computer software development company formed as a subsidiary company of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint , in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and operating systems activities. In 1998,

1728-399: The products on indefinite hold. By 1998 the transition was complete and the company renamed itself as FileMaker Inc. Claris's only other major product, ClarisWorks, was taken back by Apple to become AppleWorks . The company kept FileMaker and Claris HomePage 3.0. The latter was discontinued in 2001 leaving FileMaker as its lone offering until January 8, 2008, when the company released Bento ,

1776-657: The release of Windows 95 ), Microsoft Office crushed its two main rivals in Windows software: the WordPerfect / Quattro Pro suite and the Lotus SmartSuite . By the late 1980s, HyperCard needed updating as well but Apple management did not see any value in the product and let it wither. Complaints eventually became loud enough that they decided something had to be done. Studying the problem, they decided that all software should be released through Claris, and sent HyperCard and

1824-481: The same user interface. The original Mac could print to a dot matrix printer called the ImageWriter , but quality was only adequate. The later LaserWriter laser printer allowed dramatically better output, at a price. However, the possibilities of the GUI/MacWrite/LaserWriter combination were obvious and this, in turn, spurred the development of desktop publishing , which became the "killer app" for

1872-536: The screen resolution, making true WYSIWYG harder to achieve. The phrase "what you see is what you get", from which the acronym derives, was a catchphrase popularized by Flip Wilson 's drag persona Geraldine , first appearing in September 1969, then regularly in the early 1970s on The Flip Wilson Show . The phrase was a statement demanding acceptance of Geraldine's entire personality and appearance. As it relates to computing, there are multiple claims to first use of

1920-479: The software eventually included in the Xerox Star can be seen as a direct descendant of it. In late 1978, in parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC, Hewlett-Packard developed and released the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides (or what today are referred to as presentation graphics). The first release, named BRUNO (after an HP sales training puppet), ran on

1968-572: The tags are made visible in the editor, however, they occupy space in the unformatted text, and as a result can disrupt the desired layout and flow. Bravo , a document preparation program for the Alto produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson , Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974, is generally considered to be the first program to incorporate the WYSIWYG technology, displaying text with formatting (e.g. with justification, fonts, and proportional spacing of characters). The Alto monitor (72 PPI , based on

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2016-420: The users to type in commands. Some of these programs may have presented a graphical user interface of their own, but on the Mac, users would instead be expected to stay in the standard GUI both for launching and running programs. Having an approachable, consistent GUI was an advantage for the Mac platform, but unlike prior personal computers, the Mac was sold with no programming language built-in. This presented

2064-438: Was MacWrite and MacPaint, which shipped free with every Macintosh from 1984 to 1986. The MacWrite development team was a company called Encore Systems, founded and led by Randy Wigginton , one of Apple's earliest employees, and included Don Breuner and Ed Ruder (co-founders of Encore Systems and also early Apple employees; Gabreal Franklin later joined Encore Systems as President.) Wigginton, who had left Apple in 1981, maintained

2112-500: Was able to dominate the market with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel . While the Claris packages were arguably much more "approachable" than the Microsoft applications, the Claris software applications lacked some features of the now-mature Microsoft suite, leaving them lacking in "checkbox features." Their value was further eroded by aggressive bundling deals from Microsoft that could allow Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be purchased for

2160-410: Was eventually released as WriteNow . The first versions of MacWrite were rather limited, supporting only the most basic editing features and able to handle just a few pages of text before running into performance problems. (Early versions of MacWrite held the entire document in memory, and early versions of the Macintosh had relatively little free memory.) Nevertheless, it increased user expectations of

2208-450: Was little reason to buy something better. Apple decided to allow the programs to "wither" so that the third-party developers would have time to write suitable replacements. The developers did not seem to hold up their end of the bargain, and it was some time before truly capable replacements like WriteNow came along. In the meantime users complained about the lack of upgrades , while the third-party developers continued to complain about

2256-405: Was primarily due to extremely demanding quality assurance requirements. By the time MacWrite Pro was released, Word completely dominated the word processor market. Pro did little to address MacWrite's rapidly dwindling market share, which briefly stabilized at about 5% of the market before starting to slide again. Sales were apparently dismal, and it was one of the first products Claris abandoned in

2304-466: Was very little distinction between text editors and word processors . These applications typically used an arbitrary markup language to define the codes/tags. Each program had its own special way to format a document, and it was a difficult and time-consuming process to change from one word processor to another. The use of markup tags and codes remains popular today in some applications due to their ability to store complex formatting information. When

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