Kokopelli said:Abiword and NeoOffice. Macupdate and Version tracker could give you more.
witeshark said:Also your Mac may well have Appleworks which has a nice word processor
dtravis7 said:opps! Forgot about that. I am so used to helping friends with at least Jaguar installed I keep forgetting that 10.1 might not run some apps out there. I was going to suggest NeoOffice as it's really Openoffice but with a more OSX designed interface, but I bet it will not work with 10.1. If you want very good Office compatibility though, when you upgrade to Panther try NeoOffice. Openoffice is the same thing but runs in X11 and does not have the OSX look and feel to it.
ABIWord is nice but if you want any real Office compability for more than just TEXT docs, it does not fare well. If you are just looking for a basic Word Processor, then Apple Works, AbiWord and anything will do, but if you want backward compatibility with Microsoft office, NeoOffice and Open Office are free and very good.
The new Apple IWork Suite is very good and cheap compaired to anything Microsoft and I so far have not had problems oppening any Microsoft Doc file even with pictures and graphs.
trpnmonkey41 said:Well 10.1 was considered pretty buggy by apple when it came out and the jump from 10.1 to 10.2 was pretty significant. The updates from panther to jaguar were not as significant which made it much easier for developers to have the cross version compatibility. That coupled with the fact that it has been 2 and a half years since the release of Jaguar that most developers have stopped paying attention to anything less than Jaguar. Almost all Mac systems support Jaguar or Panther and with Apples market share growing thanks to the iPod developers worry more about making sure they have the best product that takes full advantage of the current hardware and operating systems that they don't really focus on the older OS's.
trpnmonkey41 said:The Beta's of Tiger are running on G3's so you will be OK on running it.
As for advantages over panther I definitely think it will be worth your wait to get Tiger instead of getting Panther now.
Safari 2.0 with RSS will be very nice (even though firefox has RSS now Safari is a very good broswer)
Spotlight will definitely make browsing your computer a whole new experience
Automater is a nifty little program (Kind of like recording Macro's in Word) that will let you create your own little tasks
Dashboard will allow you to have a bunch of widgets available at the touch of button built into the OS
QuickTime 7 will be a very nice update to QT6.
Only thing you will be missing out on with Tiger because of your system will be Core Image which most people would not even notice (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coreimage.html).
The jump from Jag to Panther showed speed improvements in the OS on G3's and I would expect the same on Tiger
dtravis7 said:Like trpnmonkey41 said, on the older Macs, Panther was quite a bit faster than Jaguar. On my G4-500 it was so noticeble I could not stand to ever go back. Also the Applications improved a lot like Safari and Mail. When I go back to a Mac with Jaguar on it like my old Yikes G4, there are so many improvements I can see, not to mention the speed difference too. Networking also is night and day on Panther over Jaguar, and they continue to improve it in the updates to Panther. It just keeps getting better.
They are saying that Tiger should also be a bit faster on the older systems, so if you can, wait for it. I know with 10.1 you are hurting right now but it soon will be over!