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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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
"There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what I'm aware of off the top of my head."
... Compared to this, the Windows word processing market looks small.
Yup. Mellel, Nisus Express, RagTime,
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.
...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.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I wish that Apple would have gone with an established app, rather than add another to the ever-growing list of choices.
... but I'm still a bit confused on why Apple has chosen Pages, and a proprietary format, versus a more open format.
Yeah. Choices suck. I hate those. Lock me in, please.
You are absolutely correct: You are a bit confused.
Pages uses an open XML format.
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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.
Last I checked Oracle was available for OSX as well. Its not quite free, but then again, it's Oracle.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
Amen!
:-), 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).
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
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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. :-)
Babar