RagTime 5
Words by Scott Dewbre
January 2004
In Hollywood, they have this thing
called the pitch, a one-sentence encapsulation of a project usually
with the word "meets" thrown in - for instance, "this
movie is Hello, Dolly' meets The Goodbye Girl.'" If we were
going to pitch RagTime to you, we'd say something like, "This
app is MS Office meets Quark XPress."
RagTime 5's makers (B&E Software, $695) pitch it as professional business software that handles text, spreadsheets and illustrations in a comfortable environment. We thought we really liked this concept back when it was called ClarisWorks. But the more we looked into RagTime, the more we found to like. RagTime is a powerful one-stop shop for publishing a variety of business documents, drawing information from databases and creating forms on-the-fly. Considering what all it can do, it's understandable RagTime comes with a pretty steep learning curve. Feature-packed publishing tool RagTime combines page layout features with drawing capabilities, has a complex spreadsheet feature that includes 2-D and 3-D data graphing, and is upgradeable through a variety of plug-ins that allow for an amazing amount of customization and specialization. The word processing function of RagTime takes all the standard features of a word processing app, like Word, and combines them with advanced typography and layout features of Quark or PageMaker. RagTime's spreadsheet function employs the standard mathematical and statistical functions of Excel, but allows spreadsheet cells to be merged like standard table cells. Spreadsheet cells can hold any type of information, even formatted text or photos.
RagTime's integration of such a wide variety of features, tools and plug-ins is its most impressive feature. There is no jumping back and forth between modules or toolsets, because RagTime combined all the features onto a single workspace - no more reimporting files or cutting-and-pasting data between layers. RagTime supports AppleScript, permitting the automated processing of repetitive tasks, and includes a recording feature. In fact, RagTime's makers claim that with access to Apple Event-aware databases, you can produce product catalogs and similar documents automatically. Steep learning curve We were relieved to discover that RagTime's creators include a tutorial you can access any time you launch the app. We highly recommend it for first-time users. It will save you a lot of time later on. Considering its complex features, RagTime has a very simple interface - first, draw a frame. Then decide just what you're going to fill it with. Depending on your choice, the main toolbar changes to present the tools to work with that type of information. | |
 There were a few quirks about RagTime that bothered us. There is no pasteboard, even though there is a lot of space on either side of the page. A pasteboard is an area where you can drop a chunk of text or a graphic that will stay there until you move it. This is very handy for laying out complex documents. We're still scratching our heads over the icons on the main toolbar. Though they vary from app to app, it's pretty well accepted the first three or four icons you'll see on the main toolbar will be for Open, Save, New and Print. Imagine our surprise upon seeing the first four icons on RagTime's main toolbar - a squirrel, a window on a stick, the letter "i" and something that resembles a blue Lego block: By the way, if you guessed that these icons stand for (in order) Open Inventory, Open Component, Get Info and Open Outermost Container, you should be writing this review. Importing photos directly from a camera into RagTime was easy, although there wasn't much we could do with it without the Photoshop plug-in. The Print to HTML feature was an absolute gem. Many web authors will probably cringe when they read this. Most apps with a tacked-on "Save as HTML" feature are responsible for some truly dreadful code. We found that RagTime handled creating HTML pages (including a 50-50 mix of text and photos) quickly and efficiently. Not only did RagTime create an index and table of contents automatically, it produced the cleanest HTML coding we've ever seen from a non-HTML app. As a final note, we should mention that RagTime takes little hard drive space (122MB) compared to most business software on the market, and it comes in OS X or OS 9 versions. Bottom line RagTime is probably best suited to a small business environment where a few people are called upon to produce a wide array of documents. With the additional database, photo and mapping plug-ins, RagTime becomes a one-stop shop for brochures, technical illustrations, automated business forms, parts catalogs and the other documents essential to running a business. Item: RagTime 5 > Manufacturer: B&E Software (U.S. distribution by ComGrafix, Inc.) > Price: OS X version $695 MSRP; OS 9 version $595; plug-ins extra >
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