Product Review
Teaching Edge’s Ragtime
5
By Mitchell Levine
Now that what was once
exotic technology has become commonplace, many of us have
become uncritical about the tools we use: although there
are a few alternatives, it seems like almost everyone in
the tech rank and file, keep using applications software
from the big-time players. Certainly, most teachers in our
schools don’t have time to program their apps in Visual
Basic or C++, and there are a few folks that use NOD 321 antivirus
instead of Norton, or Linux instead of Windows, but for those
most part, teachers and technology procurers in the institutions
use the lowest common denominator software.
You have to use Microsoft
Office, right? It would be a virtual act of dereliction of
duty to suggest that teachers and administrators deviate
from this well-established baseline, wouldn’t
it?
Well, I’m here to tell you there’s now an option:
Teaching Edge’s Ragtime 5 for Mac OS. Why should you
consider this heresy? Here’s one good reason: it’s
much cheaper. Without any potential discounts to the institution,
you’re looking at an advertised student single user cost
of only $95, or a sixteen-user license-share for $375! Compare
that to Microsoft’s single-user education package, which
only includes the most popular components of the Office suite,
of $145. For schools that need to stretch their tech budgets
as far as they can go to meet the mandates, that alone should
be enough to make the switch.
Of course, that’s not the only reason to consider the
Ragtime option: Comgrafix’s applications package has
a wealth of features, and, even better, was designed specifically
for Macs (but still operates cross-platform). Want a single,
inexpensive software suite that can not only cover basic (and
advanced) word processing AND do lay-out? Ragtime’s got
you covered. Plus, the program saves documents as datasets,
which allow you to compile the same basic text or images into
different formats. Working with multimedia, a very important
concept in today’s technology education scene, is clumsy
at best with Office, but a snap with Ragtime: 2D and 3D graphics,
as well as sounds and even video files can easily be incorporated.
I personally rarely work with images, so the feature I found
most interesting was the software’s Apple script capabilities.
Programming short macros – while requiring a small learning
curve – was very helpful in processing repetitive tasks,
like, to cite a recent example here, working with a list server.
Although some (in my opinion irrelevant) aspects like the
interface are a little less polished than Microsoft’s,
all in all, my opinion is that, given the powerful features
and superior price point of the application, teachers and administrators
could be doing their technology programs a disservice by not
considering Teaching Edge’s Ragtime 5 for their Mac-based
IT systems.#
For more information, visit the company’s site at
www.teachingedge.com, or reach them at their toll-free number
(800) 448-6277.
