Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
If the former, *sigh*
"Nothing particularly surprising here."
... slow day then?
Where's the "Stuff that matters"?
A little bird told me that Apple posted their own screenshots. http://www.apple.com/iwork/
It seems IDontWorkAnymore; /. effect ?
Everytime OO.o is updated there's a front page article on it. This isn't an update to an old application, it's a new word processor from Microsoft's only desktop competitor, THAT'S why we're hearing about it.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
> Nothing particularly surprising here.
Are you crazy? You must have missed the 'i' in front of iWorks- These screenshots are nothing less than spectacular!
Keynote?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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?"
I don't have the 80-column card!
The coolest voice ever.
Some of us care when someone (in this case Apple, in other cases Open Office, or KDE) releases software that challenges the dominant monopolist.
I've seen articles on OpenOffice, AbiWord, and NeoOffice J. This article fits in with that theme.
Do you have a particular anti Apple sentiment that makes this article particularly disturbing to you?
GPL Deconstructed
iWork isn't by any means an entirely new software package. Keynote is of course an existing product, though updated here to a new version.
More interestingly, Pages (the word processor) appears to be an update of a software package of the same name that was released for NeXT in 1994 by a company called Pages Software. So here we have yet MORE benefits of the NeXT purchase, albeit delayed by 8 years...
From the linked 1994 NeXTWorld article: The software, three years in the making, takes a new approach to word processing that doesn't include such conventional tools as rulers, font panels, and style sheets. Pages is being positioned as an easy-to-use word processor in light of NeXT's de-emphasis on publishing and a lack of available word-processing software for NEXTSTEP.
"The early view of the product was that it was more of a publishing product," said Larry Spelhaug, CEO of Pages Software. "Internally, we always assumed that it would have full word-processing capability but that wasn't perceived outside the company."
Pages' extensive feature set, roughly equivalent to the latest versions of WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, was entirely implemented in object-based code. The software uses design templates to ease document creation."
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
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
*yawn*.
m l nonetheless.
Of course someone knows. Apple, for one, know... and they've been kind enough to tell us all on their web site. At the URL http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/compatibility.ht
It'll save to RTF, PDF, DOC, HTML and Plain Text.
My MAC is 00:0d:93:ad:16:a4
My Mac is a 15" Powerbook.
I wonder if Pages was descended from Pages for NeXT:
Article on it.
I wonder what happened to that software?
GPL Deconstructed
Without Clippy, Pages just doesn't seem as user-friendly.
I switched to Mac about 3 years ago and really for the first 6 months, Apple Works 6 did just about everything I needed. Then I started getting to where PowerPoint was a must have for presentations and the spreadsheet would export data to excel but not the equations. So I bought Office V.x and frankly was plesantly surpised with an MS product that worked.
I work as a consultant and being able to share information with clients is a must! While we can debate the goods/evils of file formats etc. here in the world of geekdom, in the real world communication is key to me being able to put food on my table.
If apple supported OASIS, all the better, but until people are actually using the format it's not going do very much. It is a chicken or the egg arugement.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
And your new root password is "slashbot".
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Have you ever used Keynote?
If both Keynote 2 and Pages uses the same principle on their document formats as the original Keynote, it's nothing but open.
The Keynote documents (.key) are actually directories, not files, which have an XML file (presentation.apxl) and all the images, textures and data files used on it, on its original format (PNG, TIFF, etc.)
So I don't see how could this be 'another propietary Office format'. Given the facts just mentioned anyone could potentially write a Keynote viewer for Linux or whatever OS he/she might choose (or think of a Keynote to Magicpoint converter). Even the transition effects could be somehow recreated using OpenGL, as they're also into the XML file.
Regards,
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
Real geeks loved Apple up until about 1982. The Apple II was open and geeks loved it. Steve Jobs closed the Machintosh shut. No information : just plug and live with what we give you was his motto. Apple died when Woz got kicked out and the marketing droids took over. Wanna develop for Apple? Lock-in city: it only works on Apple.
That was the case with classic MacOS. OSX is Unix at the core, supports multiple languages, integrates Java better than most other platform, and much of it is open source. Even if you use the "one true toolit" Coccoa, your code can be portable to Next, GNUStep, OpenStep etc. If you buy Apple, you are buying fluff. It is not the "GUI" pioneer. It is not "the fastest PC". It's closed source GUI is a complete anathema to geeks.
If you buy a linux distro, you are buying fluff. You are not buying a Unix Pioneer, or an Open Source Pioneer. It is not the "fastest OS." Its a rewrite of a platform orginally developed in the 70's in New Jersey.
Apple is for the digital illiterati.
Apparently Linux is for the digital elitist in your eyes.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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
why apple dont you push openoffice more upfront
...what's the word I'm looking for here? Wrong.
Because, from a Mac user's point of view, Open Office is just terrible, terrible software. It isn't even a Mac application. It has to run under X11, a windowing environment that isn't installed by default and that most Mac users will never need or want. It doesn't support Mac givens like drag-and-drop or advanced typography. Hell, it doesn't even support cut and paste!
Put a computer user down in front of Open Office on the Mac, and the response is going to be "This sucks." Apple, understandably, doesn't want anybody to have a reason to say "This sucks" while sitting in front of a Macintosh.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
See the above answer, minus the part about X11. Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
What, you mean like Transmit from Panic Software?
If you consider that there are about 35 million Mac users out there, the fraction of them who ever need to use an FTP client is vanishingly small. If all you need to do is download files, the Finder takes care of that for you: FTP URLs are handed off to the Finder. For the one-in-a-thousand who need to upload, Panic has your number.
safari miserably fails to complay with w3c standards
Um? That's
fail to run properly javascript
Again with the wrong.
fail to run properly flash apllications
No, also not true.
I think the problem here might be related to the fact that you haven't got the foggiest idea what you're talking about. I think that might be a part of 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.