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Apple iWork Screenshots
applextrent submitted a story with a bunch of screen shots of Apple's new iWork package, including Keynote 2 and Pages, the new Apple word processor. Nothing particularly surprising here.
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If the former, *sigh*
Does anyone know?
Is the document format for Pages open or proprietary?
Logic is the light of the digital age.
So far, still nobody has been able to answer the question wether Apple's iWork suite will be using OASIS-compliant file formats or not.
And even if hot: will iWork at least be able to import from and/or export to OASIS?
Both OpenOffice and KOffice will be supporting OASIS and bringing Apple aboard will probably be crucial in order to establish a serious alternative to the Microsoft file format hegemony.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
Looks like adding a photo to a page of text will be very easy in Pages, with the text adapting automatically.
;-)
If that is indeed the case, it's great - one of my pet peeves with Word is how annoying adding a photo+legend to a page of text is. You basically have to redo the layout every time you change the text.
BTW, if I am wrong and there is a way to include a picture and its legend in text with the text flow being auto-adjusted, please reply with explanations on how to do it instead of modding me as a troll
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Do people think this is because we have evolved to the design to something which is useful and "optimal", or because people are no longer willing to change a paradigm which may alienate new users? Are there any word processor suites (or stand alones) that differ significantly?
I've got to say that the templates for pages look rather fine indeed - better than the design quality of stuff included in most word processors. It seems to be more suited to DTP than other WP's.
And I'm looking forward to using Keynote to create Flash animations - while probably not as good as MacroMedia's stuff, it is a cheap alternative, and knowing Apple probably works just fine.
I am reconsidering buying that Mac Mini now. The thing keeping me from having a mac was the price and lack of a reason to just do everything in Word on a PC. Apple has outdone itself.
I wonder if Pages was descended from Pages for NeXT:
Article on it.
I wonder what happened to that software?
GPL Deconstructed
During the keynote, Steve Jobs said the Pages templates would be filled with greek text. I thought, what if you speak greek? Well now that I see the templates...It looks like latin to me! Can't he tell the difference?
i think i will just make some custom templates for OpenOffice and let people download em free, maybe make a website for sharing templates to people can both upload and download templates...
of course it would all be free and GPLed templates...
OO is huge and cluttered. It's hard to change it's features to smoothly fit into Apples GUI-concept. It's UI is still stuck at the beginning of the 90s.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
Konquerer hat the cleaner code. So Safari was based on KHTML and it was a good choice. Using Safari is bliss (but not ignorance).
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
Mainly because Apple belives that FTP does not have much of a future. Their Web-DAV support is much better. There are a few good 3rd party products for FTP though.
take his comments with a grain of salt:
Keynote 2 seems to finally be able to compete with PowerPoint on a number of new levels, especially now that it has, for example, presenter display.
Keynote 1 had this and did it quite well (better than PowerPoint X and about on par with 2004).
Honestly, I found that using keynote was a delight to work with when compared to powerpoint once you got accustomed to the way it worked and the minimalistic interface which I've come to love. Palettes are much easier to work with than toolbars. Despite having an interface which is FAR less cluttered than powerpoint, I have yet to come across a feature powerpoint had that keynote 1 didn't.
As Icing on the cake, keynote will import or export to just about anything. And, as with any OS X application, PDF Export works by default. I particularly liked the Quicktime Export feature, and Flash export should prove to be interesting.
To rave just a bit more about keynote, the templates are simply beautiful and the transitions are very smooth and look beautiful (although they're by no means distracting/annoyinh like those in powerpoint).
Other awesome features -- snap-to centering both for the slide and the content pane. Transparency, rotation, and cropping work for virtually all image types. Tables actually look nice, and charts are also pleasant to look at.
I'm looking forward to the new animation tools in Keynote 2. The first version is one of apple's best kept secrets.
Presentations are all about looks and.... presentation. I've never understood how powerpoint was able to be successful while producing some of the ugliest presentations i've ever seen.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
But it also has its own, native format. That could be yet another messy, proprietary format, or it could be a standard XML-based format like OASIS. Well, which is it?
Likely it is an open file format just like Keynote (v1) and likely not that greatly different from it. They just haven't publish the information yet (the product hasn't shipped yet for one).
Keynote (v1) technote
Apple has no reason to keep it proprietary and many reasons to publish the format in the open (it helps the product if others can important/export it).
Price the whole thing at $99-$149 and release a couple more versions - people will be switching from Office in droves.
Apple recognizes the threat here - if MSFT withdraws their Office from Mac software market Mac as a platform will suddenly become a lot less desirable for tons and tons of users. All they need to do to lessen the impact is release their own office suite with 20-30% of features of competing office suite that customers use 95% of the time and most importantly get their import/export from PP/Word/Excel just right. And make it look nice (this is one of the things Open Office failed miserably at).
There you go, one less dependency.
Of particular interest, to me, is the system requirements from that page:
To use Apple's latest "works suite" or "lite office suite," Apple recommends more memory than the default amount (256MB) that comes with all Macs except the fastest PowerMac G5s (2.0GHz+) and PowerBooks (1.5GHz+).I'm assuming Apple will include iWork with new Macs starting January 22 (iWork's scheduled release date). Will Apple sell Macs that, by default, have less than the recommended memory to run a single app that comes preinstalled?