RagTime

• 1. Introduction

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  RagTime is a publishing program that refuses to act like most software. Picture a single document that holds your spreadsheets, your written report, your charts, your images, and a slide presentation, all at once, without switching between applications. That is not a fantasy pitch. That has been the reality of RagTime since 1986. The name itself carries a story. Development began in 1985 on the Macintosh, under the working title MacFrame. When it shipped, the developers renamed it after Lotus Jazz, another integrated software package available at the time. Yet while Jazz faded, RagTime pressed on, finding a loyal home in Europe even as North America closed its doors. What made RagTime unusual enough to survive nearly four decades? And what happened when success turned to bankruptcy, and a company had to rebuild itself from its own wreckage? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Frame Principle

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  Every page in a RagTime document is built from frames. That single design decision separates RagTime from most comparable software packages. Text, images, spreadsheets, drawings, and charts each live inside their own frame. Content can sit fixed within that frame, or it can flow outward into a connected frame through what RagTime calls a pipeline. The pipeline concept means a long passage of text can thread across multiple frames on multiple pages, all linked together. This architecture also means RagTime recognizes no separate document types for different kinds of data. A spreadsheet and a ten-page report and a set of vector drawings share the same compound document format. The filename extension for a finished document is .rtd, short for RagTime document; templates carry the extension .rtt. Formulas, which work like those in a spreadsheet, can be placed not just in cells but inside text blocks and graphics as well. The drawing tools go deep enough to include Bézier curves alongside standard polygons and lines.

• 3. European Stronghold

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  In the European Macintosh market, RagTime built a prominent position that it has held ever since, even as that share has shrunk over time. North America was a different story. The program carried a price tag of $395 in 1990, and that cost proved too high for the American market to absorb. The North American sales office shut in 1991. The timing was not coincidental. Shortly before the closure, Claris Corporation released ClarisWorks, which reproduced much of what RagTime offered at a far lower price. Unable to compete on cost, RagTime retreated from the continent entirely and concentrated on its European base. The original developer, Brüning and Everth, eventually passed the software to B&E Software, and later to RagTime.de Development. For a long stretch the company focused exclusively on the Macintosh, before finally releasing a Windows version in 1999 as RagTime 5.0. Against Microsoft Office and its entrenched presence, the Windows version never gained significant ground.

• 4. RagTime Solo and Its End

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  Until the middle of 2006, RagTime ran a free tier called RagTime Solo, distributed in some markets as RagTime Privat. The Solo version matched the commercial edition in features and performance, with one gap: it lacked spelling and syllabification dictionaries. The license barred commercial use, confining it to personal environments. On the 5th of July 2006, RagTime issued a press release announcing the end of Solo. The company stated directly that the license conditions were often misinterpreted or deliberately flouted, and so it discontinued the free version, with no private edition planned for RagTime 6. The abandonment of Solo came at the same moment the commercial RagTime 6.0 was beginning to show momentum. That momentum did not hold. Sales dropped significantly in the years after RagTime 6.0 launched, and disagreements among shareholders about the company's future broke into the open.

• 5. Bankruptcy and Rebuilding

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  In July 2007, RagTime filed for bankruptcy. The shareholder disputes that had simmered after the post-6.0 sales decline had no clean resolution, and the company collapsed. Out of that failure, a new entity emerged: RagTime.de Development GmbH, which took over the rights to the software and took charge of development. A separate sales partner, RagTime.de Sales GmbH, handled distribution until October 2015, when RagTime.de Development GmbH absorbed the sales function as well. The rebuilt company kept the software moving. RagTime 6.6, released on the 8th of October 2015, was an extensively revamped edition that added support for high-resolution Retina displays on OS X and brought compatibility with Windows 10. The version history shows how the rebuild sustained momentum: RagTime 7.0 arrived in 2023 with support for macOS 14 on both Intel and ARM processors, followed by RagTime 7.0.4 in 2024 for macOS 15 and Windows 11.

• 6. Programming Underneath

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  RagTime 1 through 3 were written in Pascal. Starting with version 4, which shipped in 1996, the entire codebase moved to C++. That transition underpinned every subsequent release. On the Mac side, RagTime provides an AppleScript library extensive enough to automate almost any task, from generating documents without manual input to exporting finished PDF files. Users can also record their own interactions directly inside the AppleScript Editor; those recordings capture the live operation of RagTime as a replayable script. Scripts can be embedded in the document itself and triggered via menu or keyboard shortcut. Windows users working with RagTime 6 and later have access to an OLE/COM API, which opens RagTime's components to automation from any programming language that Microsoft's environment supports, through a type library that maps the available object catalogue. The current release is RagTime 6.6.5, available for OS X versions 10.6 through 10.14 and for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10.