Better than Finder? Ark Workspace - Software Review - the alternative Macintosh desktop software from Ark Interface - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1992 by Rick Doucette

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Because I'm so comfortable with the Mac's Finder interface, my first reaction to the concept of Ark Workspace, an alternate Mac desktop, was negative. This changed quickly. The concept of Ark Workspace goes beyond launching applications. It changes the way you work on a Macintosh. Workspace displays a full-screen, functional picture of an office space. Picture tools and dialog boxes launch applications within the office (instead of the Mac desktop), start and manage projects, and track project work time. In other words, Workspace does the computer management so you can focus on the work to be done.

In the center of the office is a desk, with tools (a pencil, for example) that you click for quick access to your mostused applications. There's a calendar you click to start keeping time, and a thermometer that brings up the Preferences dialog box. Nine binders on the room's left wall automatically categorize your most popular applications--word processing, page layout, and so on--and can easily be customized to suit your own needs. There is also storage space-- desk drawers, shelves, and flat files--for project Portfolios, which store all of the documents that pertain to a project. (These are among Workspace's biggest assets, especially good for people who work on a lot of different applications for one project and cut and paste among them.) The Overview window shows a snapshot of all the documents in a Portfolio, so I could decide--and fast-- which one to call up.

Freelancers will love the fact that as soon as you open a project Portfolio, Workspace starts tracking your time. Project time can be tracked and reported by day, month, and year, and can be printed or saved as a text file for use within other documents--a great feature for client billing that's a bit less complex than Timeslips.

Version 1.0 isn't perfect--it crashed or hung up occasionally, and not all features worked flawlessly--but Ark is about to release version 1.1, which supposedly fixes these bugs and adds several new enhancements. The productivity improvement for most people will pay back the software cost in a very short time. I found Workspace to be simple to set up and easy and fun to use. And after all, isn't that why you bought a Mac? --RICK DOUCETTE

On Taxes

The older I get, the more self-employed friends I have. That says something about my Vietnam-era generation, which never really wanted to work for corporate America in the first place, and about the times, which are not conducive to job-for-life career planning. On any given day, you can read The Wall Street Journal and count tens of thousands of layoffs; one summer day, several of our editors sat around the magazine office and counted 65,000 souls hung out to dry.

This is not news to anyone, except perhaps the leaders of the land, but the tenacity of this downsizing trend, which at one point appeared to be a temporary condition, is remarkable. How much longer can it last? My job here is not to lament this state of affairs, for it has had many positive repercussions, as hundreds of thousands of our self-sufficient, self-satisfied readers know. I'm here to speak out for a new constituency in American politics in this presidentialelection year.

I've been canvassing self-employed friends and readers to find out what bothers them most about their new station in life, asking what the next president could do to improve their lot. I have read their lips, and the single most galling fact of life for them is the self-employment tax--15.3 percent of net income. "Forty-nine cents on the dollar out the window," they say, including federal, state, and local taxes. "Where's the incentive to work, to produce?"

On the one hand, many of the newly selfemployed see themselves as libertarian risktakers who live without the security of a paternalistic corporation and thus don't need coddling by the government. On the other hand, many of these former employees seem to forget how much of their weekly paycheck went to taxes, Social Security, union dues, and health insurance before they ever got a chance to touch the money. In other words, employees get used to their weekly take and tend to forget how much they're giving up; the newly self-employed aren't used to getting a $1,000 check and mentally or physically putting aside x percent to pay for their retirement and repairs on our roads and schools. So part of the problem is perception.

Beyond that, if you gross $50,000 in revenues, you don't pay 15.3 percent of that to the government for your self-employment tax--even though that's the way you may think of it. You pay the tax on your net profit. If you have convinced yourself that 49 cents on the dollar (or whatever, depending on your tax bracket and your state and local taxes) is down the drain, you look at every $1,000 check as being worth $510. In fact, some of that $1,000 may go toward tax deductible business expenses.

Still, this fine point doesn't amount to a hill of beans, because an independent businessperson is like a guard dog protecting its master's house: Are you friend or foe? When a businessperson eyes the encroaching Uncle Sam, his gut says, Foe ! One of my friends who rants about the self-employment tax is Caleb Warren, a home-based investment adviser on Cape Cod. "I don't mind putting away money for my retirement, but I know I could do a lot more with it than the government can," says Warren. "Why can't I build my own nest egg?"