PC Mag Review of Apple iWork '05

sammykrupa writes "PC Mag has a review of Apple's new office suite, iWork '05. iWork '05 includes a word processor, called Pages (though the article refers to it as a cross between a page-layout program and a word processor) and presentation software, called Keynote. They say that iWork '05 is a 'small but significant assault on Fort Microsoft.' The article also explains that the suite is strong in typographic and visual features - the areas where Office is weakest."

Comments

Pages not an Word competitor

[chihiro]

I think business users are going to use Office, whatever. I think the good thing about Pages is that it offers a cheap home alternative for those who just wouldn't buy a full copy of office for 400 odd quid, and who only want to write and read letters.

Not a moment too soon...

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[Mr. Cancelled]

I wish that Apple would have gone with an established app, rather than add another to the ever-growing list of choices.

On the Mac, right now it appears that there's several options: Neo Office (a Mac specific flavor of OO, it appears), the MS Office Suite(s), Abiword, Appleworks, and now Pages. There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what I'm aware of off the top of my head.

Not to mention the lyriad of choices you get if you want to go back in the Macs history (I didn't jump ship till OSX, but there's lots of options available for older versions of Macs, which will still run fine on the shiny new G5's). Oh! And of course if you add X11 into the picture, you also get all of the choices that Linux offers (KOffice, OO, etc.)

I'm all one for choice, but Apple needs a clear winner for it to gain corporate acceptance. Most corporate offices will balk at such statements as Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout (from the review). A lot of users also want an app. that they can work on their documents from work on (whether taking documents into work from home, or from work to home). Since most offices use MS Office (a small but growing number use OO), such statements as "almost perfect import/export" will also sway them to choose MS Office over this.

It's only v1 still, so there's lots of potential for changes down the road. I personally would like them to make Pages native format 100% compatible with either OO or MS Office. then you could take advantage of whatever features Pages offered you, but you'd also be guaranteed that you can continue to work on that document at another PC, much less deliver it to your boss/teacher/what-have-you without having to worry about formatting, compatability, fonts, and so on.

iLife 05 looks very promising (I'm particularly looking forward to Garageband 05), but I'm still a bit confused on why Apple has chosen Pages, and a proprietary format, versus a more open format.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[mmkkbb]

On the Mac, right now it appears that there's several options: Neo Office (a Mac specific flavor of OO, it appears),

Still in beta, not usable for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Appleworks

Replaced for the most part with either iWork or MS Office.

Not to mention the lyriad of choices you get if you want to go back in the Macs history (I didn't jump ship till OSX, but there's lots of options available for older versions of Macs, which will still run fine on the shiny new G5's)

They may run OK, but they're almost definitely missing a pile of nice OSX features only available to native apps.

Most corporate offices will balk at such statements as Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout

No Outlook competitor, no Excel competitor. They're not going after MS Office (at least, not yet)

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[lpontiac]

much less deliver it to your boss/teacher/what-have-you without having to worry about formatting, compatability, fonts, and so on.

This is not an issue, because export to PDF is built in to the OS X printing system. Every Apple application that prints supports it.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[Chucker23N]

"There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what I'm aware of off the top of my head."

Yup. Mellel, Nisus Express, RagTime, ... Compared to this, the Windows word processing market looks small.

But like the above-mentioned ones, Pages doesn't have a lot in common with the more commonly-used apps like Word or OOo Writer. It's been written and *designed* from scratch. Its UI is unusual, and maybe so in a positive way.

They have done the same with Keynote, and I can see your unhappiness about the fact that this makes iWork incompatible with OOo. I hope that Apple will add import / export filters at some point, but writing converters should be trivial considering iWork's formats are XML-based and rather human-readable.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish that Apple would have gone with an established app, rather than add another to the ever-growing list of choices.

Yeah. Choices suck. I hate those. Lock me in, please. ... but I'm still a bit confused on why Apple has chosen Pages, and a proprietary format, versus a more open format.

You are absolutely correct: You are a bit confused.

Pages uses an open XML format.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nine-times]

I'm all one for choice, but Apple needs a clear winner for it to gain corporate acceptance.

Pages isn't a bid to win corporate acceptance. If you want a clear winner for corporate acceptance, Office X has been the clear winner for years.

Like the parent of your post said, Pages isn't built to be a MS Word killer. It's also not supposed to be an Adobe InDesign killer. And neither iPhoto or Preview are meant to replace Photoshop.

However, Pages does seem to be pretty good at what it does, which is simple/easy word-processing and page layout design, and I'm sure many people will find it to be a pretty good value at $80.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[burns210]

"On the Mac, right now it appears that there's several options: Neo Office (a Mac specific flavor of OO, it appears), the MS Office Suite(s), Abiword, Appleworks, and now Pages."

MS Office is owned by MS. Apple doesn't control it (price, features, speed).

Neo Office is a start, but it is non-native, java, and has a ways to go to even be a complete OO.o system, let alone a Office replacement.

Appleworks is outdated, runs in carbon, not cocoa, and needs massive updating.

Pages needed to be a cocoa word processor to keep Apple in the game and give them a nice cheap word processor they can sell in-house.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[hunterx11]

Apple doesn't want to replace Office. For a lot of people, Office is the killer app. If MS stopped making Office for Mac, no amount of "switch" campaigns would make up for it.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[Gob Blesh It]

Oh, no! Mac OS X has too much software. Someone please save me from all these choices!

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

but they're almost definitely missing a pile of nice OSX features only available to native apps.

Yeah, like the services that allowed me to determine that "lyriad" is not a word in the English language. It is, however, a welsh word, and one spelling for an annual meteor shower. I think you meant "myriad."

Omnidictionary service allows lookup of words in multiple online dictionaries simultaneously from any cocoa app. The look up in google service is offered by Safari. :)

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[flufffy]

Office is the killer app.

Well, it certainly kills me to use it.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nottsp1]

To what extent do you think Apple kept Pages feature stripped on purpose? The rumor mills were rife with the 'Word killer' threads, and this proved fruitless. Is this because of the relationship Apple continues to keep with Microsoft following the 1997 (I think) deal? Lets not forget, Microsoft is one of Apple's largest shareholders.

Similarly, did Apple choose not to step on Adobe's feet any further, since Adobe have already abandoned OS X versions of Premier?

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nine-times]

Well, I think the whole "not wanting to step on Microsoft's and Adobe's toes" certainly provided incentive to keep Pages simple.

However, I suspect that there's another big reason, one that was probably at least as influential in the design of the final product. A lot of the Geek/Linux crowd really DON'T understand Apple's design philosophy.

If you look at Microsoft products, for example (and I'm not trying to start a flame-war, just noting a different design method), and version 1.0 is usually crap. I can't think of an MS program that was even usable before version 3.0, and it's usually not very good until version 4.0. Why?

Microsoft will create a version 1.0 application with 1000 features that barely work, and the program will be a PITA to use. By version 4, they've spent years redesigning, taking things out, putting things in, until it's a patchwork program with 700 useful features.

Apple, on the other hand, will put out a comparable application with version 1.0 having only 500 features, but most of them work decently, and the program is fairly pleasant to work with. It won't do everything the Microsoft version 1.0 program will do, but what it does, it's pretty good at. They use this product as a base, and spend years carefully adding features in places that don't disturb the original design. By version 4, it's a solid program with 700 useful features.

So it gets to be a question of what you think is better-- to throw in all sorts of features all at once spend years sorting it out, or use a smaller set of more targeted features as a base and then build off of that?

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[b17bmbr]

Lets not forget, Microsoft is one of Apple's largest shareholders.

not any more. ms dumped their stock a year or two ago. that's one of the reasons, when ms said it wasn't updating IE for the mac, apple got safari going. yes, ms still has an active mac division, but officeX is still carbon. and other than office, which might not generate the long term $'s for continued development, what other ms products do yo see on the mac? none. apple knows it has to offer a full package, which is odd considering it is different from its traditional model of being primarily a hardware company. apple can't rely on any one market, as they have discovered playing to the "creative" niche. they now address the geek, the novice, the hip (itunes/ipod), and soon they'll be a serious solution for the SOHO. they still own the creative set, but they won't keep apple in the black forever. in fact, it's probably better that they're weening themselves from redmond.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[Alan Partridge]

Office, IE and WIndows Media Player are all available for MacOSX.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[b17bmbr]

but other than office, as I mentioned, how many people use IE or WMP on the mac? my guess is few. safari and firefox as well as QT are the standard. and microsoft uses both ie and wmp as a camel's nose so to speak, to get inside the tent. on windows, ie and wmp basically borg the system, giving microsoft greater control of a variety of features, which they can't do on os x. and as i mentioned, one has to wonder if the ms mac division is worth the expense long term. apple has to know this, and rightly is preparing for the day when no updated office negates an apple solution. ipods and itunes put the mac on more minds, being able to use it as a drop in replacement for a "PC" puts them on more desks. that is linux's gretaest weakness. that, for all the great features, it always has one thing missing, whatever that "one thing" is. thus, linux (on the desktop) isn't a viable replacement in most instances.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nine-times]

but other than office, as I mentioned, how many people use IE or WMP on the mac?

True, IE is a bit dead on the Mac. Some people still use it, either because they don't yet understand there are alternatives, or because they have some website they visit that's IE only. But mostly, yes, it's dead.

WMP, on the other hand, ends up being necessary. It's not that QT isn't good, but not everyone uses it, so if you want to view a movie, and the movie is only available as WMV, you have no choice. In this way, I think Microsoft makes WMP for the Mac only to push WMV as a "standard". So many media people use Macs that you can't have a media standard succeed without playing on Macs.

I sometimes suspect that this is the only reason Microsoft makes *anything* for OSX. Apple has some entrenched users in certain markets, and if Microsoft didn't provide some level of compatibility, those markets would refuse Microsoft products. Then, their "standards" would be less standard, and they would have a harder time locking people in to their products.

Also note that their OSX products are usually a generation behind (like WMP often is) or lacking features (like Entourage). I think that this is actually the strategy.

MS can say, "You use Macintoshes? Yeah, you can have a Windows server running Exchange, and then Entourage will connect to that." Then, when it doesn't work right, they can say, "Yeah, that's because Macintoshes don't really work right. You should be using Windows machines instead."

Likewise, they can encourage users to distribute video in WMV, audio in WMA, and office documents in DOC, XLS, and PPT, on the idea that Macintosh users all have WMP and Office, so those formats are "standard". When Office for Mac opens the file different, or the Windows Media file didn't open because it was encoded with the version 9 codecs but they only provided the version 8 codecs for OSX (which was a problem for a while), they can claim their formats are good and it's Apple's platform that's bad.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[rich3rd]

This is not an issue, because export to PDF is built in to the OS X printing system.

That depends on what is meant by "deliver" in the GP. If all the recipient needs to do is read or print the document, a PDF is fine. If they need to edit the document, that's a whole other can of worms. Although they covered importing, I don't believe TFA made any mention of what alternate file formats (if any) Pages is capable of exporting. According to Apple's web site, "Pages is compatible. It imports AppleWorks documents and imports and exports Microsoft Word documents." Yet TFA doesn't even mention this "export to Word" feature, or whether or not it actually works as advertised. A glaring omission, IMO.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nottsp1]

In an update to my earlier question, this snippit may be of interest if anyone is still following the thread:

" MacObserver hilights the key points from the article which will also appear in print in the Feb 21, 2005 issue of Fortune. It provides some interesting insights into the recent history of Apple from Steve Jobs' perspective.

Of interest, according to the article, Apple approached Adobe in 1998 to develop consumer targeted Video/Photo software, but Adobe said "no"... which triggered Apple's decision to develop its own software (FCP, iPhoto, iMovie)."

Most important part of TFA

[Staplerh]

Damn. This was a dissapointing read. The most important paragraph IMHO concerned 'Pages' - I'm a Mac user who relies on MS Office and was mildly excited about being able to switch to iWork in lieu of Office (and the inevitable $$$ upgades). Unfortunately:

In our tests, Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout. And there are still plenty of features where Pages needs to play catch-up with Word. For example, Pages lacks a grammar checker and revision mark-up abilities. Also, there are none of the collaboration, tracking, and security features that make Word so excellent in business settings. Pages lacks Word's long-document features and Word's (sometimes shaky) ability to combine multiple subdocuments into one master document, as well as the ability to split a window so that you can work on two different parts of a document at the same time. We were also surprised to find that Pages loads and saves files slowly compared to other modern applations.

Damn. The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version. "Minimal Changes" in page layout? Damn.

Now, I'll admit that much of this is Microsoft's fault - they have their proprietary .doc format, and it's probably a bitch to crack. But other things.. revision could have been aped by Apple. Heck, the feature to split the window so you can work on two different parts of a document at the same time. These are all things that perhaps the standard enduser doesn't work, but I'd say the cost/benefit analysis would have argued for the inclusion of these features!

Now I know that Pages is just going to be a 'page layout' feature, and it does look beautiful - but damn it, for a minute there I was hoping that I could finally have a Microsoft free Mac.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Gorbag]

I don't know about the other features, but revision tracking is critical in a corporate or other group environment (university papers) where there are multiple authors and reviewers. I hate the lack of support in Word for citations (without 3rd party hacks), but live with it over just using LaTeX primarily because of the review/revision facilities.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the current version of Word? If I am not mistaken, it's version 9. Also, it's been on the market for roughly 20 years.

Pages is version 1.0 and it's not even a months old. Give Apple some time to add features and fix problems. The fact that it's compared to Word instead of Nisus Writer et al. shows that it's a strong contender.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[searleb]

I think there is an important thing to note about the page layout problem. Conversions between Mac Office and Windows Office have always resulted in "Minimal Changes in the page layout" as well, even if they are the same version number. You still always have to check (and fix) your document on a Windows computer.

This is particularly noticable in Mac Powerpoint to Windows Powerpoint. For example, a couple of years ago I gave a small presentation I wrote on my mac with (the then new) Office.X. They wanted me to do it on their Windows computer and so I decied to wing it. I was horrified when all my tiff graphics didn't come up and all my properly (mono) spaced fonts were converted to san serif (nothing lined up). I learned my lesson and never trust the (or any) converter anymore.

I haven't tried the new Pages and Keynote yet, but other positive reviews of the conversion features suggest that Pages/Keynote to Word/Powerpoint is probably not any worse off than where current Mac Office users are now. I'm not going to ditch Mac Office, but I'm going to buy iWork next time I get to the Apple store. The new features not included in Office, such as the Keynote to QuickTime converter (programs to do movie demos cost high hundreds to thousands of dollars), are my motivation.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

revision tracking belongs at the OS layer or lower, not in applications.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[njfuzzy]

The "minimal changes" referred to could simply be the result of the same fonts not being present. This is not the fault of the "Pages" application.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn!

Re:Most important part of TFA

[guet]

The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version.

I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor. It'd be great if they bundled subversion, and gave users easy to use version control right there in the finder, and of course in an API accessible to the applications too. They could have a central repository (hidden) for each user, and just check stuff in and out as it was changed, collecting comments from the user on what changes were made (or automatically generating comments from diffs).

Then you could rewind, diff, look at version etc all to your heart's content. Only thing they'd have to deal with would be giving documents out to other people, but again if they were clever about it the svn info could be in the document bundle too, so that your commit comments, changes etc on that file were picked up automagically when sent to someone else. Anyway, enough rambling.

Re the Minimal Changes in document layout - it doesn't surprise me they had a hard time with that as lots of versions of word have the same sort of problems with earlier versions of their own software, which should tell you something : ) Re Pages being just page layout, that's its primary function just now, however it may evolve into a more general purpose tool.

There are a whole load of different word processors on OS X, and depending on their needs, I think most people could quite happily live in TextEdit, TextMate, Mellel or Pages, it's just they feel they *need* Office because that's what everyone else uses. .doc is probably one of the worst document formats to use as a way to store your stuff as it's constantly changing, binary, and very difficult to reverse engineer. So if you ever do want to move from Word, you'll be stuck.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[grouchomarxist]

PowerPoint also has a QuickTime export feature, although in my opinion Keynote QuickTime export works better. Both applications support interactive QT (clicks on links work), but with Keynote you can navigate with clicks and keyboard keys like it is a presentation.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Mattintosh]

Most of the reason documents don't convert properly is due to differences in the fonts they use.

The Mac has a glut of bitmapped fonts that tend to look OK on the screen, but turn to crap on paper. They also lack Windows counterparts. Windows apps (at the Office level of sophistication, anyway) will try to match the font to one that is named similarly, and failing that, a default font (usually Arial). This causes alignment to be way off with any kind of other elements (graphics, WordArt, etc). Add to this the fact that "Mac" fonts and "Windows" fonts somehow are treated differently despite being compatible with both platforms, and you have a recipe for a clusterfuck.

Another problem is in the basic differences between the Mac's and Windows' way of doing graphics and font rendering. Windows works on the assumption that the screen has a resolution of 96ppi, while MacOS assumes everything is at 72ppi. This screws with font rendering. Windows uses a slap-the-text-into-the-box-wherever-you-want system, where some programs put text centered vertically and horizontally in the container, while others just plop the text on the bottom edge of the container. The Mac defines a system-wide bottom-edge for text relative to the container, so you don't lose any tails from the j,p,q,y characters. (This last one was the case at least as recently as Win98, so feel free to correct me if things have changed more recently.)

(In other words... it's not about platform superiority... it's about sloppy converter coding. Just in case someone wanted to use my comments as flamebait, I'll douse the fire right now.)

Re:Most important part of TFA

[aristotle-dude]

Well damn, I guess iWork is designed as a replacement for Appleworks, not Office. Apple stated this already. Why are so you confused as to who they are targeting with this? If you are looking a revision abilities, then you are obviously a business user and should stick with Word.

There is no need for revision tools in a home user application. Perhaps they will add it in later versions but we are talking about a version 1.0 product here.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitmapped fonts? Who uses those on the mac these days?

Are you talking about OS 9?

Re:Most important part of TFA

[djward]

compared to other modern applations

And which applation did they write this in? Whose spellchecker actually works?

Re:Most important part of TFA

[ce25254]

The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version.
I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor.

It is already built in to OS X. It is called CVS. ;-)

Actually I just looked at one of my Pages documents. The document is a directory:

aDocument.pages/
aDocument.pages/.typeAttributes.dict
aDocument.pages/Contents/
aDocument.pages/Contents/PkgInfo
aDocument.pages/image-5.png
aDocument.pages/index.xml.gz
aDocument.pages/embedded_image_1.jpg
aDocument.pages/embedded_image_2.jpg
aDocument.pages/thumbs/
aDocument.pages/thumbs/page_thumb_1-4.tiff

Contents of index.xml.gz begin like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<sl:document xmlns:sfa="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/s fa" xmlns:sf="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/sf " xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instan ce" xmlns:sl="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/sl " sfa:ID="SLPublicationModel-0" sl:version="2004093000" sl:generator="slingshot" sl:app_build_date="Dec 21 2004, 16:41:21"><sl:version-history><sl:number sfa:number="2004042200" sfa:type="i"/><sl:number sfa:number="2004061000" sfa:type="i"/> ...

Re:Most important part of TFA

[NutscrapeSucks]

> I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor.

Have you used Word's revisions? The feature is tightly bound to the presentation layer. It works nothing like a sourcecode version control app.

Anyway the root poster should try Office 2003. Vastly improved revision markup over O XP. (Haven't used the Mac version, so can't compare.)

Re:Most important part of TFA

[JoshG]

Ever heard of something called VMS (OpenVMS these days...)? Built-in version control, at the filesystem level.

I'm not there yet.

[Lonesome Squash]

It's not really a replacement for Appleworks, since it doesn't have spreadsheet, drawing, or painting components, although the FA hints that there might be a spreadsheet in a future release. Those get used a lot in our house, where three school-age children use Appleworks (and occasionally Office) to prepare their lab reports, papers, and projects.

On the plus side, it:

does'nt have a grammar checker, Who need's 1, anyway's?

imports/exports Word docs

integrate with iLife. It's a matter of hours until my daughter has a garageband track backing her history report. Wait, maybe that's a minus...

Apple's site (cited in the OP) is short on details. But from what we see, I'm going to wait until the product fills out a little more. Appleworks with the occasional resorting to Office is working well enough that I don't need to spend $80US.

But I would tell anyone who wanted cheap, high-quality presentation and layout software to grab it. The samples on the Apple site look just lovely.

Re:I'm not there yet.

[Your Average Joe]

$80 for Appleworks? Dude! Appleworks comes free on the new $499 Mac Mini...

Re:I'm not there yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

does'nt have a grammar checker, Who need's 1, anyway's?

I reread your post multiple times, but I still can't tell if this sentence is a joke. Who needs a grammar checker? You do, apparently.

Re:I'm not there yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I reread your post multiple times, but I still can't tell if this sentence is a joke. Who needs a grammar checker? You do, apparently.

I only had to read it once to know that a) they were joking, and b) they were subtly suggesting that grammar checkers are useless geegaws that will not make a semi-literate moron seem intelligent.

Huh?

[PythonRules]

I guess it has been a long time since I last read PC Magazine but I find it interesting that they are reviewing iWork. I suppose Apple is an advertiser and lord knows these rags have to keep the people paying the bills happy.

Re:Huh?

[Alan Partridge]

Apple has been making PCs for over 25 years.

Early adopter

[Laplace]

My wife and I have been using Pages to write letters and resumes. So far the only complaint that I've had is that it can be a bit tricky to change the style and formatting of some of the sample documents.

One thing that confuses me is why Apple doesn't buy The Omni Group's productivity software (Omni Graffle and Outliner). Adding those to iLife would bring it much closer to being an Office competitor (no such thing as an Office killer).

iWork was well worth the $79 for Pages alone.

Re:Early adopter

[PythonRules]

Apple has been a bit of a nusiance to third party resellers and developers of late. They are slowly killing their business by duplicating it themselves. The Konfabulator story comes to mind plus some resellers have filed lawsuits.

Still, I don't think it is in their best interest to buy up an app and re-package it. In the long run it is better to have more diversity and let consumer eco-system sort it out.

Re:Early adopter

[KillerDeathRobot]

Still, I don't think it is in their best interest to buy up an app and re-package it.

It's worked pretty well with iTunes so far.

Re:Early adopter

[ColdGrits]

"They are slowly killing their business by duplicating it themselves. The Konfabulator story comes to mind"

WTF?

You mean Dashboard in OSX 10.4, which is an OS X implementation of features from OS7 and earlier, are somehow ripping off Konfabulator (which itself was nothing more than a ripoff of MacOS 7 and earlier's features anyway)?

Interesting revision of huistory there!

Re:Early adopter

[PythonRules]

That's a typo. I meant ...they are slowly killing their 'Third Party businesses'...

I'm familiar with the history of Konfabulator but that story still got a lot of milage in the press. I mean, afterall, here was the alternative to the evil empire stepping all over some poor little independant developer.

Similarly, the reseller can't get stock because the Apple retail stores snap it up and they have a price matching policy now to boot making it very hard for those guys to eek out a business.

I see it all as lose-lose. If they buy up Omni, lets say, then they lose an oppertunity to expand the product offerings for their platform and if they write there own, well... then they are competing unfairly (not my opinion but how I think it gets played out in the public opinion forum)

Re:Early adopter

[ColdGrits]

I get what you mean.

Although with the Dashboard / Konfabulator thing, it's hard to see what else Apple could have done?

They are adding back the nice additional things left over from old MacOS, but a 3rd party comes along and copies Apple's own stuff and releases it.

What should Apple have done? Not added their own feature back to MacOS X? Licensed their own stuff back from teh Konfabulator guy?

Apple do have a history of buying or licensing things to add to their portfolio where it makes sense (most recent one I can think of is when they bought eMagic and now develop Logic Audio themselves, porting some of the code and features to their lower-level music apps like Garage Band], but I don't think they are really to blame over Dashboard...

Re:Early adopter

[Laplace]

I see it all as lose-lose. If they buy up Omni, lets say, then they lose an oppertunity to expand the product offerings for their platform and if they write there own

I'm not so sure about that. I'm sure that many of the Omni shareholders would love to cash in their stock in a nice Apple buyout. It would give them the freedom to start on a new venture, or to continue developing software they love without fear of going bankrupt (which I would imagine is a very real threat at Omni).

Re:Early adopter

[burns210]

They also bought (soundjam, or something?) iTunes' original code. I also think(?) that they offered to hire the Watson guy... Which they really should have done, it is badass software and Sherlock was a pretty obvious catchup to the functionality. So there is a history of at-least trying to buy/hire good talent, when needed and where it makes sense.

FYI: The Watson developer is now working at Sun on an unrelated, but cool(so he says) project.

Re:Early adopter

[Moofie]

I'd have a little more sympathy for Arlo Rose and Konfabulator if he'd go ahead and fix the grievous memory leaks in his program that I paid for.

Until then, I'm eagerly awaiting Dashboard.

Re:Early adopter

[Moofie]

"Still, I don't think it is in their best interest to buy up an app and re-package it"

I think Apple getting rid of (or, at least, reducing the severity of) their "Not-Invented-Here" complex is the reason they're so successful now. Now, they seem to take good ideas, polish them 'till they gleam, and sell them at reasonable prices.

All I got to say is, I'm a very happy customer.

Re:Early adopter

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I have been using Pages

How come Apple users always drag there whole family into the slashdot discussions.?

I'm a Linux user and altough my girlfriend visits the bank, checks email and plays solitaire and what not on my computer I seldom drag her into discussions here.

I have decided that all these family meetings in the Apple threads are prewritten trolls just waiting to get some exposure.

Re:Early adopter

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine anything cool coming out of Sun these days. Solaris has been stagnant for at least 8 years now. Yeah, they've bumped version numbers and acted like they had new stuff, but it's been the same since about version 5, maybe 6. SGI is even worse, sitting on IRIX 6.5 for the last 8 years. Nowhere near the level of advances in those two over the last 8 years, as compared to Apple in just the last 18 months! But I digress.

Re:Early adopter

[TheRaven64]

One thing that confuses me is why Apple doesn't buy The Omni Group's productivity software (Omni Graffle and Outliner).

Probably because it's useful to them to have a 3rd party developer of Omni's calibre that they have such a close relationship with (Omni products are bundled with new Macs - full versions, but not the latest version - and Omni's web site is linked to all through the Apple developer docs).

Re:Early adopter

[burns210]

You're a troll, but I will respond. Solaris 10 has Containers, DTrace and ZFS just to name a few. Containers are best-in-class, Dtrace is unparalleled, and ZFS has a lot of security and reliability enhancements.

It's the interface, stupid

[legLess]

The article also explains that the suite is strong in typographic and visual features - the areas where Office is weakest.

Speaking as an ex IT manager and someone with many Office-using friends, the weakest part of Office isn't it's formatting. What most people I know hate about Office is Word's attitude. "Did you really mean to do that? How 'bout if I correct it for you?" "Are you sure you wanted to paste that? Don't you want me to change the styles a little?"

Word encapsulates Microsoft's condescending attitude towards its users; it tells users that they're idiots and need hand-holding. Apple's software tells its users that their time is valuable, that they're probably right most of the time, and that they're smarter than their computers.

Being a geek forum, I can see the responses now: "Ha! Those lusers just don't know how to use it. That's their own fault." Wrong. Microsoft's UI and workflow are driven by program managers with a list of market-driven features. Apple does the same thing, but adds list item zero, non-negotiable, absolutely primary, that Microsoft doesn't understand: the user experience.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[elecngnr]

So true. Although I do a majority of my writing in LaTeX, I do occassionally have to use Word. My biggest problem with this program is convincing the program that I know what the heck I am doing and to stop changing things for me. I actually have a MS Office Specialist Certificate for Office 2000. It just seems to me that the way things ought to work are often backwards of the way they do work.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[Lonesome Squash]

When I used to teach a course on MS Office (pauses while PTSD-style flashbacks ease off a bit) I used to explain it like this. "Office is like having a big, friendly, eager-to-please giant with an IQ of 80 standing helpfully between you and your work."

Don't worry, I'll capitalize that for you. When do I get to pat the rabbits, George?

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[kaan]

The parent post is right on. In fact, I think it barely touches on the differences between Office and Pages (or any other Windows-based software vs. it's Mac counterpart).

For example, look at iPhoto: fairly minimal on features. In fact, when iPhoto was released, I recall hearing all kinds of important sounding people say a bunch of unimpressive things, that iPhoto lacked features, that it didn't have the power, blah blah blah. But what they missed was the simplicity of use. iPhoto is so much easier to use that it absolutely nails 90% of the things you want to do in a perfect, simple package. For the remaining 10% of your photo tasks (advanced editing, for instance), use something else.

Apple's approach in general is to nail the common use cases, and nail 'em to the goddamn wall, whereas the Microsoft approach (and again, a majority of apps on Windows) is to offer you 4,000 features that you can't understand or figure out, so you kinda hobble along with the app, barely able to get your tasks done.

So could Apple have added multiple sub-document support? Yeah, probably. Do I even know what that is, aside from having read someone else's rant that it doesn't exist in Pages? No, I don't, and I don't think I care. I could say the same thing for a lot of the other "features" that are supposedly "missing" from Pages.

The Omni Group also gets this same design principle - do something well, and keep it simple. There's a huge reason why OmniOutliner is an app that I (and thousands of other folks) use on a regular basis, and it's not because it has all kinds of complicated, contrived "features" that some marketing group in Redmond came up with under corporate sales pressure.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that.

When I wrote my thesis, I had a choice to go with LaTeX or with Word. Being a so-so LaTeX user and seeing that Word supports LaTeX features such as cross-referencing etc., I went with Word, believing that I would save time.

Big mistake. Word kept changing the heading levels, lists, figure placements, widows/orphans. It was not consistent from the point where I saved the document and the next time I opened the document. It corrupted some of my equations (which made the file unsaveable -- had to hunt down the offending equations, open Equation Editor and replace them). And the worst offending problem was Word's automatically starting header numbers not from 1. Sometimes Section 1 became Section 3 and therefore, Section 2 became Section 4 and subsection 1.1 became 3.1.

It was so problematic that I had to spend much time with Word than with writing my thesis. But I already invested much time with it and it'd be foolish to change to LaTeX.

Word's "features" are more likely to be a hindrance than a help and there is nothing to convince Word that we know what we are doing.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[Delilah Jones]

Death to the paperclip.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[flufffy]

I third that. I quite happily wrote ten thirty-page chapters for my diss, only to find that when I pasted them together into one doc, just before I was to hand in the final draft to my committee, the formatting got screwed up in a bazillion unpredictable ways and I had to go through the whole thing and reformat by hand. It took hours. iWork may be basic, but it can't possibly be more *shite* than Office.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[milkman_matt]

The Omni Group also gets this same design principle - do something well, and keep it simple. There's a huge reason why OmniOutliner is an app that I (and thousands of other folks) use on a regular basis, and it's not because it has all kinds of complicated, contrived "features" that some marketing group in Redmond came up with under corporate sales pressure.

Curiosity... I got a copy of OmniOutliner bundled in my powerbook, as well as iCal. What makes Omni so much better than iCal? It looks nice, but I just can't see a reason to use it.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[mapinguari]

I wish I had a little Mac. I would hold it and love it and squeeze it...

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[macshit]

Amen!

It's like the difference between drawing a picture (word) and writing a program to draw a picture (latex) -- word may seem easier at first, but as soon as you want to change something non-trivial, or ensure some kind of consistency across a large document, well, you're screwed if you used word.

I dread getting documents in word because I know that it will look crappy and be damn near impossible to change in any non-trivial way.

Unfortunately many people are so fixated on the initial learning curve bump of something better like latex[*] that they'll invest insane amounts of effort into maintaining their word document, and the result will still suck.

[*] Yeah, latex/tex is pretty horrible in many ways too (e.g., the macro language from hell, whose main design goal seems to have been efficient execution on computers from the 1970s :-), but the underlying concept is so superior to word that its flaws pale in comparison. There are interesting competitors to latex like "lout", but they all seem to have their annoying aspects (for instance lout's formatting language is rather too verbose and fiddly -- it insists that you explicitly mark each paragraph as a paragraph using @P -- and the author used !@#$ capital letters for even common formatting directives).

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[BenjyD]

Unfortunately, Word use is becoming far more common in academia. The last conference I submitted to were really sniffy about accepting PDFs, and the days of getting LaTeX article templates seem to be numbered.

I'm always astounded when I see people using Word for academic work. LaTeX is just so much less work and produces vastly superior output.

This reminds me of the old days

[Smack]

Where the cover story on PC Magazine was:

WordPerfect vs. Word

Also at MacCentral...

[Ford Prefect]

Another review, picking up some unfortunate problems with multiple page layout and PDF exports on non-Apple machines. It does sound like an excellent beginning to a great package, but it's very much 1.0 at the moment. I'm not sure I'll be getting the iWork suite straight away after reading the reviews, but I'm definitely going to keep a eye on it.

Personal pet hate about many programs - rubbish WYSIWYG, which applies to so many word processors and most definitely OpenOffice and KOffice. My old Atari ST running Papyrus could get it right, providing a pixel-perfect version of how the document would print on-screen, and now with Quartz and Pages it looks like I'll be able to do some half-decent document processing without spending a fortune. Assuming, of course, Apple fixes the bugs soon. :-)

Re:Also at MacCentral...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can, of course, use Papyrus on OS X. You can even use a current version if you speak German...

Re:Also at MacCentral...

[Llywelyn]

> it looks like I'll be able to do some half-decent document
> processing without spending a fortune.

Have you tried publicon?

Re:Also at MacCentral...

[Ford Prefect]

You can, of course, use Papyrus on OS X. You can even use a current version if you speak German...

I know - and they've been taunting me with a 'available very soon' for the English version for most of the past year... :-/

I wish they'd hurry up and finish translating it!

Re:Also at MacCentral...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you only write German?

Dear Apple,

[cryptochrome]

iWork needs a spreadsheet and database. In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration. Unfortunately there are no integrated alternatives.

If this/these programs are in the works and simply waiting for Tiger's Core Data framework, that's fine. I'm planning on upgrading to Tiger ASAP anyway. But if iWorks with the spreadsheet/database is included on new systems, I will buy a new machine.

Re:Dear Apple,

[Tanlis]

I would think with Filemaker 7 that this would solve the issue of not having a relational database.

Mind you, I'm not the biggest fan of gui dbs and would rather code my own stuff any day of the week, but I've heard pretty high praise about Filemaker.

Re:Dear Apple,

[Golias]

Filemaker 7... Mind you, I'm not the biggest fan of gui dbs and would rather code my own stuff any day of the week...

PostgreSQL runs on OS X if you want to get your fingernails dirty.

It's not quite Oracle, but then again, it's free.

Re:Dear Apple,

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use Access you suck. Where can I start with Access. MS has got you thinking you need to use Access. Why use Access?

Re:Dear Apple,

[rjstanford]

Last I checked Oracle was available for OSX as well. Its not quite free, but then again, it's Oracle.

Re:Dear Apple,

[daviddennis]

Oh, come on.

Access works fine as a database ... ... as long as it has three records in it.

Once it has three thousand, forget it.

Learning that was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the scars still show. As a direct result of that, whenever I hear the word "microsoft" I involuntarily cringe, duck and run for my life :-(.

This was around when Windows95 came out. For all I know it's a great database now. But then, it LOOKED like it would work great and had some elegant design features ... and then when someone tried to actually use it with real data, it blew up.

Oops.

D

Re:Dear Apple,

[ChuckleBug]

In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration.

What database functionality?!? As far as I can tell, there isn't any at all.

Re:Dear Apple,

[GaryPatterson]

I've got a set of Access databases used for storage of call centre data. Two of them are nearing 1.5GB in size, and another two are around 800MB. Access is stable under certain conditions. These databases are purely tables. No queries, no forms, just tables. The input and output is done through 'satellite' databases, seperating data storage from data manipulation. Very stable. Access works very well if you seperate front-end from back-end. As a multi-user system, it works nicely up to about 20 users in the front-end, after which it starts failing. But that's when you create a web-based front-end and only open the link when you're retrieving or sending data. Other DBMSs are much more scalable and stable out of the box, but have their own issues. Access is one of the best for getting a prototype up and running quickly. Having said all that, we're in the process of moving to SQL Server. The databases I mentioned above are not considered high priority, because they're so stable. It's not luck. It's knowing the tool and using it inside its limits.

Re:Dear Apple,

[cryptochrome]

Excel can be sorta kinda used for database purposes, and sorta kinda used in a relational database way with some rather complicated IF statements.

Re:Dear Apple,

[grrrl]

iWork needs a spreadsheet and database

no way.

iwork is supposed to be simple and easy to use. databases are not simple or easy or really very useful for everyday work, and would be wasted on the majority of users.

if you need a database get one of the established programs out there already, and leave apple to concentrate on useful, everyday apps.

great programs

[e**(i pi)-1]

Pages and Keynote are both great programs. Both are easy to learn. I tried out Pages a week ago the first time and liked it immediatly.

• Both Pages and Keynote has good templates which makes it easy to get started.
• I found already the first version of keynotes more stable then powerpoint, especially for presentations with lots of movies. I did not find any flaws in Pages yet but I must say, that I write almost everything with LaTeX myself.
• Both Pages and Keynote store their documents in an XML form with pictures, etc stored seperatly. This makes things more stable. Pages stores the XML file in gziped form. To look at the XML source of Pages (which does not have line breaks), just add some newlines with :1,$ s/>\r if you use the vi editor.
• Pages can read and export MS word documents. This works fine for simple documents, more complex layouts get tossed around a bit but it is easy to rearrange things.
• Keynotes can read and export powerpoint. Similarly, if Keynote exports to powerpoint, there are things which need to be touched up.
• What I like especially about keynote II is the ability to export the presentation in SWF form. If only one could chose the size of the exported file. There is an easy way around: export as quicktime movie in a smaller format and toss that into Flash.

Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess

[PierceLabs]

I've been surprised at how many people glaze over the flaws in Pages when they are fairly significant and wouldn't be glazed over in Office. While I do use Pages the problems with are very pronounced, especially from an export perspective. Unless you're exporting to PDF or raw Text, the export is just poor.

Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're exporting to PDF or raw Text, the export is just poor.

I have only tested pages preliminarily as it does not have certain features I require every day. I mostly would want to export to PDF, HTML, and a custom XML, with the occasional word export. I could make the XML work with their native format and some perl-fu. What export problems have you encountered? I thought the HTML was very nice, especially compared to the crap that Word poops out. I tried the word format, and it seemed to be just fine. I could not see any obvious problems in any of the 3 versions of word I have handy. I have not looked at the RTF is it poorly crafted? What particular flaws have you found?

Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

the export is just poor

It is? The HTML makes text in the form of a URL into links automatically. I am not too keen on that, but I can see where other people would like it. It would be nice to have an option to customize the export and remove that feature. Aside from that, HTML and Word formats both seem pretty perfect. What issues have you found?

Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess

[PierceLabs]

Take the family newsletter template. It will convert parts of this that has user editable text into one big image, while simultaneously splitting up some single columns into several columns. It will dump background entirely when they could become table backgrounds and it will use fonts that aren't likely to be present in many other places.

Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess

[PierceLabs]

Export the Design template to HTML and Word. You will have to go behind the exported format and completely adjust it to something that is even remotely close to the original source format.

Hits the Apple core!

[bishr]

Based on everything I've read, it looks like Pages is pretty darn good - the analogy to other Mac applications (iTunes, iMovie, the iLife suite, etc) is obvious, in that it does what the majority of home PC or Mac users need it do, but cleanly, intuitively, and naturally. The lack of grammar checking is a fairly major flaw, but I would expect that to come in a later version (just as early versions of iPhoto had some significant limitations that were largely resolved in later versions)

Incidentally, the posted review is very brief and maybe not worth a slashdot post...

Missing information

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC Mag review is missing a number of fairly significant points. They fail to cover:

Word compatibility - this has been perfect so far for me, although I have only used it on a few documents. The import and export has been just as good as that in Word so far.

HTML - the HTML export feature produces clean and readable HTML with each character or paragraph style mapping to a CSS style. Again, I have only tried a few documents, but this is much, much better than Word's HTML output.

Other formats - Pages can output to text, rich text, and PDF, in addition to HTML and DOC. The native format is a container folder (similar to applications) containing the file in an XML format, and all binary resources. This makes extracting an image, sound, movie, graph, or whatever easy on any platform.

Missing formats - there is no option to output a customized XML, OpenOffice format, WP, Appleworks (import is supported), or Latex.

In general, pages is fairly usable, and seems like a great replacement for reading and writing basic documents in word, and great for general home word processing. I'd like to see more templates, cross-references, and the inclusion of a good thesaurus (will be in tiger).

The review mentions Word's long document support. We had to abandon word at one of my previous jobs simply because it could not reliably open and save documents more than about 150 pages with a medium number of graphics. My preliminary tests with Pages seem to indicate no problems with documents about 200 pages long. The review also mentions long open and save times. It is actually about 3 times faster to open and save the same document as word (with each using their respective formats) and almost as fast as word at converting and opening a word document. I can't believe how little recognition the DOC and HTML capabilities of pages have been getting. Perhaps I will write up a thorough review myself, at some point in the near future.

Re:Missing information

[bar-agent]

It won't be long before someone (maybe Apple, maybe not) sets up a template repository. Then it's just a matter of waiting for people to submit their own templates that you can download.

Re:Missing information

[Anonymous Coward]

No way Apple would do this. That would be like Apple hosting third party appearance themes.

They put a lot of effort into keeping the choices limited when it comes to customization because they feel anything sub-par would only dilute their own design efforts.

Re:Missing information

[rich3rd]

No way Apple would do this. That would be like Apple hosting third party appearance themes.

Poor analogy. I think it would be more like this.

Pages lacks a grammar checker

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Name me one word processor that has one. (And don't try to tell me the thing in Word actually checks English grammar.)

Re:Pages lacks a grammar checker

[BlastQuake]

I seem to remember that Professional Write 2.?? had a grammar checker, as well as a way to score the readability of a document.

Re:Pages lacks a grammar checker

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There are a bunch of metrics out there for measuring the readability of English text. In my opinion they're all a bit silly. Much of the world's greatest literature would score badly and young children's writing can score highly.

Re:Pages lacks a grammar checker

[Synbiosis]

I don't think people are looking for great literary strength in TPS reports, though.

One nice thing about these tools...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...is native PDF support. For example you can create diagrams in Omnigraffle or Adobe Illustrator (say) or equations in LaTeX (dragged and dropped from here) and insert them easily into your document as vector graphics. This means that they can still be scaled, rotated or otherwise transformed without any loss of quality even though they are no longer in the package that created them. This is a great boon for people preparing technical presentations.

Re:One nice thing about these tools...

[TheRaven64]

I couldn't agree more. I've seen people on Windows try to use the drawing tools in PowerPoint and produce some really ugly looking stuff. OS X seems to exemplify the UNIX philosophy in this regard - one tool does one job well. Keynote is for laying out slides. That's all it does. If you want an equation, render it using the Equation Service (or whatever you prefer) and drop it in. If you want a diagram use OmniGraffle to draw it and drag it in. Images? Drag and drop again (being able to drag images from Google's image search straight into a Keynote presentation is great).

Re:One nice thing about these tools...

[swiftstream]

Hmmm...

Now, more than ever before, I feel myself wishing I wasn't a poor student and had the money to shell out for a nice Apple Powerbook...

*sigh*

Re:One nice thing about these tools...

[TheRaven64]

See if your institution runs the iSchool program. You rent a machine for 1, 2 or 3 years and then pay a small amount at the end to take ownership of it. It's more expensive in total than buying at the education store price, but it's spread over longer. Also keep your eye out for education deals. When I got my PowerBook, Apple were doing 10 months interest free credit on iBook or PowerBook + iPod deals for education customers (which gave me a perfect excuse to get an iPod as well). Apple also have a refurbished store where you can often pick up last generation models for a 25% discount.

excellent security in word?

[compactable]

From the article:

"Pages lacks ... the collaboration, tracking, and security features that make Word so excellent in business settings."

Can someone hilight the securuty features in word? I'm not trolling, I'm serious. The only mention of Word and security I know of comes from cases where Word has shown more than it intended.

export to html

[r3dx0r]

has anyone tried to export a document to html ?
even word, which is known for its crappy html export, does a better job than pages.
they could have at least made sure that the default templates export correctly.
other than that i like pages, it's not a word competitor by any means.
pages just makes the average user write good looking letters in no time.

Re:export to html

[Anonymous Coward]

even word, which is known for its crappy html export, does a better job than pages.

I have not tested it extensively, just a few quick documents and some imported word docs. I thought the HTML was very nice. It was readable and all the custom styles mapped nicely to CSS styles. all the preset styles map to plain HTML without CSS. I thought this was a great solution for backward compatible HTML. It makes it easy to avoid CSS if you so desire. Even background shading inside and out of tables worked perfectly. There was no problem with quickly HTMLizing a several hundred page book. It seemed much, much better than Word's unreadable garbage to me.

Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[revscat]

Look, I'm all for tools to make our lives easier. But if someone doesn't know their native tongue well enough to write a complete, well-formed sentence, grammar and spelling checkers just exacerbate the problem. Maybe I'm being somewhat Luddite-ish, but I believe that a firm grasp of language allows for clearer thought, not just A's on papers in college and high school.

Moral of the story: Grammar checkers -- when they even work -- perpetuate stupidity.

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[mfender9]

Here here!

--
(Yes, I'm joking...)

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[the pickle]

Thank you.

First thing I always do whenever I have to deal with Word is to turn the grammar checker OFF. It just annoys me. I write quite well, thanks, and I don't need Clippy telling me when he thinks I'm not.

p

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[Anonymous Coward]

Where where?

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that a firm grasp of language allows for clearer thought

Then how come the who/whom thing always confuses me?

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[mdielmann]

The grammar checker, like any other tool, has its uses. I find my grammar more than sufficient, yet I still make mistakes occasionally. I have Word do the underline thing if it thinks I make a mistake, and I review them. There are some I ignore outright, since I've been over them before and don't agree with the checker's assessment. But it does catch some mistakes, and teaches me something new in the process. But, like any tool, if you use it as crutch you will be weaker for it.

Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how come the who/whom thing always confuses me?

Because you lack that firm grasp of language he was referring to?

It needs a Windows version

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm serious.

Appleworks was popular with schools because there was a Windows version. A Windows version of Pages would ensure that it could be used by schools without fear of compatibility problems. And, as with iTunes, it would seduce even more Windows users to the Apple Way.

DD

Re:It needs a Windows version

[Anonymous Coward]

QuickTime and iTunes are Carbon apps, they do use some of the cool features of OS X, but they're 'legacy' applications. Pages is a Cocoa application, it gets all sorts of cool stuff for free because it's Cocoa. I don't think Apple wants to start making a Cocoa framework for Windows, such a thing would be fucking awesome. I'd love to be able write Cocoa Applications that had Windows and OS X versions, but those Cocoa frameworks are pretty tightly integrated with OS X.

Re:It needs a Windows version

[Guy Harris]

I don't think Apple wants to start making a Cocoa framework for Windows

And they especially wouldn't want to call it Yellow Box.

(I'm not sure whether it was ever released. The Wikipedia article on NeXT appears to be saying some beta releases might have been made before it disappeared.)

Re:It needs a Windows version

[aristotle-dude]

Why? Compatibility should be acheived through import/export of other formats.

No Grammar Check?

[thedbp]

GOOD. I think that grammar check is a lousy feature. Not because it doesn't work, but because it encourages laziness and encourages people to rely on automated helpers rather than learn their native language. If I'm reading something that someone wrote, I want to know that they wrote it THEMSELVES, that they know how to construct sentences and use language effectively and properly. It is important in making hiring decisions as well. If someone comes off great on paper, but can't make conversation on the same level as their augmented written works, then they will be less effective employees.

How is this different than spell check? Dictionaries have always been readily available to double-check your work, and it is much harder to memorize the exact spelling of every word in a language than it is to master the much fewer rules of sentence structure and the like. Also, in speech, spelling doesn't matter, only pronunciation. So as long as you can form sentences correctly and pronounce words correctly, you don't sound like an ass.

Grammar check is contributing to the dumbing down of culture. If we continue to rely on automation to provide us with the basics of communication, communication will begin to break down and fail more and more often...

Re:No Grammar Check?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think that you are trying very hard to distinguish qualitatively why spelling checkers are less of a "dumbing down" than "grammar checkers." There is not really much difference. Dictionaries are used to learn meanings, spellings, and pronunciation. Books like the "Chicago Manual of Style" are used to check grammar and usage. Meaning, spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and use are all misapplied, some in writing, some in speech, some in both. Professional writers like to have access to both. Most professional writers have others proof and edit their work anyway. If you are concerned about someone's writing skills, for a particular job, looking at a writing sample is a good way to judge. If they know how to use a grammar checker effectively, all the better. If you are concerned about their speaking ability, and personal interaction... talk to them before hiring them.

As you can probably tell from this post that I am not using a grammar checker right now. I do have one installed as a system service, but I usually only apply it to works that are destined for print, or customers. It is useful for catching minor issues, although it is wrong more often than it is right. (It is still better than the one that came with Word.) Your ideas about grammar checkers are elitist. Please stop using a spell checker and start complaining about how spell checkers make people dumber. At least then you will be consistent.

Re:No Grammar Check?

[thedbp]

For the record, I don't use either in day to day writing. If its a professional writing job, I'll use a spell check.

And most professional writers proof and edit their own copy LONG before it winds up in the hands of an editor.

I don't think it is elitist to expect people to be able to weild their own launguage properly. I certainly wouldn't want to have every gun owner out there carrying around a manual that they have to reference every time they reach for their pistol. I would expect them to KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING. I am not elitist, you have just accepted lower standards because it is more convenient for you.

Re:No Grammar Check?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I don't think it is elitist to expect people to be able to weild their own launguage properly.

I think it is funny that the above sentence includes two misspellings and one grammatical error.

I certainly wouldn't want to have every gun owner out there carrying around a manual that they have to reference every time they reach for their pistol

The purpose of a pistol is to kill. The purpose language, written or spoken, is to communicate. Hopefully the average pistol owner can aim, fire, and hit a target safely. Hopefully the average communicator can successfully transmit their meaning to another person. Not too many pistol owners can hit a playing card, while shooting from the hip, at 20 meters, with their off hand. If someone can do so using a laser sight, I'd say it is a good investment. Similarly, if someone can more effectively communicate a message using a grammar checker, that too is probably a wise investment.

I am not elitist, you have just accepted lower standards because it is more convenient for you.

Computers are tools, that make things easier. A truly artistic communicator would write everything by hand, in beautiful calligraphy, with each character expressing nuances that cannot be achieved with electronic type. That is impractical. Expecting everyone to memorize pedantic rules, that are more or less arbitrary, and often related to some old rule of typesetting, or latin conjugation, just in order to express basic information is equally impractical. The "Chicago Manual of Style" is about 4 inches thick, and lists all sorts of rules that most people just don't care about. If you do care, well that's just peachy. Just don't expect other people to devote the time. It is unnecessary 99.99% of the time, in order for effective communication. That time could be better spent learning logic, cascading reasoning, or the psychology of discourse. All three would better serve a person who wanted to communicate more effectively. None are generally taught in the public school system.

People who harp about grammar are generally just trying to prove how smart or educated they are. Anyone who studies grammar quickly realizes that it can always be "more proper." If you are truly concerned about effective communication, look to the content of someone's writing, their logic, their reasoning, the progression of ideas, and order of presentation. Grammar is mostly just window dressing.

Re:excellent security in word?

[jaredcat]

You can password-protect entire documents and sections of documents.

There is a crude user and group system that allows you to define permissions, or alternatively you can just turn protection on or off.

You can restrict non-privlidged users to either no read privlidge, no write/change privlidge, or the ability to only write/change to form fields.

Dear valued customer,

[Thu25245]

We are thrilled that you have expressed interest in Apple products and/or services.

As you know, two years ago, we introduced Keynote, our package which allows you to easily create visually stunning presentations. This year, we have released version 2 of Keynote, along with our new document creation package, Pages.

Perhaps in another two years, we will introduce version 3 of Keynote, version 2 of Pages, and version 1 of some hypothetical spreadsheet package. Maybe then, we'll strike a deal with FileMaker, our wholly-owned subsidiary, to bring the powerful and easy-to-use FileMaker software available to iWork customers as part of a new bundled package.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank you for bringing this glaring omission to my attention. I never would have thought of it without your suggestion. I'm forever in your debt. I'll send you a free iPod, as a token of my appreciation.

Sincerely,
Steve Jobs

[NOTE: Poster is not connected with Apple or Apple employees in any way. Above post is speculation. Please do not sue poster.]

Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0...

[King Babar]

...has issues. Here are the great things about Keynote 2.0:

1. Like all Cocoa apps, you get emacs-style editing keys for free.
2. 99% of the infuriating bugs in Keynote 1.0 have been fixed.
3. "Paste and match style" (not the exact name of the feature)
4. Vastly improved table handling.
5. Better inspectors
6. Improvements in load/save times
7. Interactive quicktime export
8. Can eat its own dogfood: check out the interactive introduction to Pages and Keynote that comes with the package.

Basically, if you liked Keynote, you will really, REALLY like Keynote 2.0. If you hated Keynote, you're much more likely to be satisfied. Unfortunately, it still doesn't do HTML Export.

Pages is an interesting concept. It does have the same emacs-style editing keys, paste with style, and an innovative templating idea. But its Word input is *very* buggy for documents with lots of placed graphics. It can't round-trip Word documents.

Its HTML import is decent, but its export is very disappointing; it does use CSS, but then also garbages up many of the tags with ad hoc style entities. It doesn't round-trip HTML. The basic notion of styles is very nice, but rudimentary, and it doesn't let you define your own style sheet in CSS 2 or CSS 3 and be done with it. It was nice that they included letter templates, but the styles on those were mostly pretty twee; it would be easy enough, though, to template your own letterhead. The nucleus of a very good idea (similar file format for Pages and Keynote) right now mostly benefits Keynote over Pages.

The nicest things I can say about Pages are that it would be a nice choice for any document you have that is shorter than about 8 pages or so and/or happens to match a pre-existing template well. It will be the King of Flyers and mailers. Also, there is the distinct possibility that some things will be fixed in dot versions, and that Pages 2.0 will be as improved as Keynote 2.0. If they introduce that next big upgrade *next January*, they might really have something.

So iWork was completely worth my $39 (edu pricing) just for the vastly improved Keynote. It would have been worth $79 (regular list) for the same reason. Many people who would be tempted to do plainish documents in Pages might be better off using TextEdit, which is actually a service under Mac OS X 10.3

And here ends my core dump. :-)

Re:Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0...

[TheRaven64]

Only one thing irritated me about Keynote 1. It didn't automatically resize text (font and line spacing) in bulleted lists to fit the box. Does 2.0 do this?

Re:Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0...

[King Babar]

Only one thing irritated me about Keynote 1. It didn't automatically resize text (font and line spacing) in bulleted lists to fit the box. Does 2.0 do this?

I feel your pain, but the answer is "no". And, in Apple's defense, I think you could argue this is a feature and not a bug. If Keynote did what you would like, it would be an invitation to create all those maddening Powerpoint presentations with unreadably small text (when projected in an actual venue). I've learned to accept using a continuation slide if what I really want to do requires more bullets than space.

Re:Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spending developer cycles on the import of Word docments is a waste of energy. Getting a decent export to .doc format is perhaps another thing, and Pages still has a ways to go there. I noticed that indented tables can become unindented, and their border width changes. I'm just going to make some Word-friendly layouts and save them as templates.

It's silly to think that you are ever going to be able to use one program to seamlessly edit a document made in another and export it out again, especially with a format that's as much of a mess of a format as Word's. The only way this will ever happen is if the format itself is XML or the like and is defined as a detailed public standard in great detail by a third party organization. In that case it would be clear whose program is not up to snuff and needs to be fixed. Open Office is out there as a possibility, but the best idea I've heard is to use HTML or XHTML with CSS formatting as a word processing format. Although to non-CSS freaks this sounds wacky, the CSS v. 2.1 and 3.0 paged media extensions make it entirely possible. Here's a discussion: http://muux.com/wp/

Save as PDF next time.

[Anonymous Coward]

All Macintosh applications can export to PDF for presentation compatability.

Don't expect this to be free

[beetle496]

There will be templates available, but not hosted by Apple. The really good ones you will have to pay for.

I am amazed that Keynote has inspired cottage industries just selling themes! It boggles my mind that inexpensive software on a marginalized platform can sustain the livelihood of these companies, for example: 1 2 3.

Your post proves the point.

[MisterSquid]

ind my grammar more than sufficient, yet I still make mistakes occasionally.

This is not meant to embarrass you, but to point out that the grandparent is right, even regarding your not-too-grammatically-complex post. To wit, let's take the following sentences from your post.

Sentence 1:

There are some I ignore outright, since I've been over them before and don't agree with the checker's assessment.

This is a grammatical error. Subordinate clauses (ones that being with subordinating conjunctions like "since," "because," and "although" do not take commas when following an independent clause. While this may seem picky (it is), it is also the equivalent of geekspeak regarding the English langauge.

Sentence 2:

But it does catch some mistakes, and teaches me something new in the process.

You have a comma between a compound verb: "catch some mistakes AND teaches me something." That's just plain wrong.

My point is not to make you look like a jackass. Your post is well-formed and perfectly intelligible even to someone with a professional knowledge of grammar. However, like most who believe that a grammar checker gives one the opportunity to catch potential problems, your knowledge of English grammar is not advanced enough to help you distinguish right from wrong. Grammar checkers, even when they make writers pay more attention to their writing, provide most people with a false sense of security.

For my part, if I were to see such errors in a document, say like an application for graduate admission into an English program, I wouldn't even blink. I don't think it's that big of a deal. But I definitely wouldn't want someone who makes such errors to think that a grammar checker actually helps to improve his or her written expression.

Just to be clear on the matter, I'm not some prig who thinks I write perfect English or that "perfect" English is the be all end all. For one, English grammar was *invented* in the 18th century and the person responsible for that first grammar was in fact working on incorrect assumptions (mainly that English is a Germanic language which it is not). I make mistakes all the time, but that's a horse of a different color.

Re:Your post proves the point.

[mdielmann]

While all of your points may be correct, and I'm not certain they are (the second one, I make the first one all the time), it's something of a moot point since (and see, the heuristic model helps, too ;-) I didn't use a grammar checker on that post, and you wouldn't be able to tell the errors I've stopped making because of it. And for the record, I don't think those count as basic grammatical errors.

BTW, no offense taken, or intended.

[O/T] Why I Love vi

[ZxCv]

...just add some newlines with :1,$ s/>\r if you use the vi editor.

And they say vi is hard to use.

Overall, A Good Start

[__aaasvk1266]

I've been using the app for about a week, and haven't experienced any real problems. Keynote simply kicks ass. My problems are on the Pages side.

I disagree with some of the UI, but that may shake out in later versions. I want to be able to customize individual functions on the tool bar, not groups.

As it stands, a two-button mouse (which I use) makes for optimal WordSmithing. I wonder what take harcore MacHeads have, if any.

Short version: Goodbye PowerPoint, goodbye Word.

I was suprised that iWork got as good a review as it did in a PC mag. An observation/review element left out: PDFs created in Pages look just fine in Acrobat Reader. If nothing else, Pages is a cost effective PDF creator. Looks like Adobe is going to take another hit from Apple.

EOL