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Utilities (Apple) Software

Apple iWork Screenshots 396

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gee-look-it-processes-words dept.
applextrent submitted a story with a bunch of screen shots of Apple's new iWork package, including Keynote 2 and Pages, the new Apple word processor. Nothing particularly surprising here.
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Apple iWork Screenshots More

Apple iWork Screenshots

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  • "Nothing particularly surprising here" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chipster ( 661352 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:17AM (#11378661)
    Is that a quote from CmdrTaco, or the author, Trent?

    If the former, *sigh*

  • Right.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EvilCabbage ( 589836 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:17AM (#11378664) Homepage
    "Nothing particularly surprising here."

    ... slow day then?

    Where's the "Stuff that matters"?

  • Apple Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:23AM (#11378687)
    A little bird told me that Apple posted their own screenshots. http://www.apple.com/iwork/

  • iDontWork (Score:5, Funny)

    by BESTouff ( 531293 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:28AM (#11378707)
    It seems IDontWorkAnymore; /. effect ?

  • Are you kidding? (Score:5, Funny)

    by smug_lisp_weenie ( 824771 ) <cbarski.4503440@bloglines.com> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:30AM (#11378716) Homepage
    > Nothing particularly surprising here.

    Are you crazy? You must have missed the 'i' in front of iWorks- These screenshots are nothing less than spectacular!

  • Document Format (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SaLogic ( 241420 )
    Does anyone know?

    Is the document format for Pages open or proprietary?
    • Since the Keynote document format is open it is very likely that the other application in iWork will be too.

    • Re:Document Format (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:58AM (#11378818)
      *yawn*.

      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.htm l nonetheless.

      It'll save to RTF, PDF, DOC, HTML and Plain Text.
    • The document format is XML and the schema for it should be posted sometime after the release. How SOON after the release I'm not sure. Just FYI, the Keynote schema that's currently posted on Apple's site is for version 1. V2 can read V1 docs, but cannot save to a V1 format. V1 of course, cannot open a V2 presentation.

  • Does the suite the OASIS-format or not? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by motown ( 178312 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:35AM (#11378733)
    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.

    • Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @12:33PM (#11378977)
      really hate to sound like a troll and all, but if 98% of the business world continues to use MS formated documents, MS formats will remain the defacto standard. Being able to communicate is critical in today's world.


      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.

      • Re:Bogus (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )
        Absolutely, Microsoft file formats are the standards. They are a bad standard for many reasons. So people don't like this and what to change it. Getting Apple on board with the new standard would help a lot.
      • That's all very true for people that do interchange most of their documents with others that are using MS Office. But IMHO that's an often overestimated group. I think that for most people, expecially in the SOHO market that Apple mostly serves, exchanging office document files with others is only an occasional need. And that's what import/export is for. So long as the import/export is impressively good, it needn't be an issue.

        I have MS Office on my PC, and I've got to say that MS Word is far too compl

      • 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.

        If I remember correctly, the European Union is considering making OpenOffice XML an ISO standard. Sun is really pushing this, of course. With a population easily larger than that of the U.S., we're talking about one very, very big egg. Apple would be stupid not to support it, as it is free.

        But then we all know that Apple doesn't do too well when it

  • Damn, I can't run it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:35AM (#11378734) Homepage
    I don't have the 80-column card!
    • I don't have the 80-column card!

      Yep. It's sometimes amusing that people here like to show they've been around by saying things like "I remember when Appleworks was called Clarisworks" -- When Appleworks was an integrated package on the Apple ][ seems to have been when most of these people were in nappies.

  • I'm looking for an OASIS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ChiralSoftware ( 743411 ) <info@chiralsoftware.net> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:51AM (#11378783) Homepage
    I hope that Apple will do the smart thing and at least have Oasis (OOo file format) import and export built into this. If they are just using the same old MS formats, they are admitting that they are owned willingly. It's so easy to write third-party tools for searching, comparing, and extracting data from OASIS files that this would fit in with the whole Apple "it just works" idea. Do it Apple!

    Also I am a bit surprised that Apple didn't go with an existing software base for their Office suite. It is obvious that what they are doing is a defensive maneouvre against the possibility that MS will drop Apple support for Office, like they did with IE. Apple had to have some non-IE backup plan and they chose to take Konqueror and turn it into Safari. Good choice Apple. But they could have done the same thing with iWorks. There are two code bases they could have picked: the obvious OpenOffice, and also KOffice. Actually KOffice is quite good, considering that it's a "small" project. And if they liked Konqueror then maybe KOffice would have also been appealing to them.

    One interesting thing about this is that it is indicating that office software is becoming a commodity. There are currently half a dozen office suites out there (MS Office, iWorks, OOo, SoftMaker, KingSoft, KOffice and probably a few more I'm not remembering right now). I actually hope that iWorks is also ported to Linux, but that seems very very unlikely.

    • Apple wants easy to use, pretty, slick, useful and fun consumer apps. they must show off and fully utilize Quartz and integrate well with iLife. OO fits about... hmm, not many of those. I bet it is *far* easier to develop Pages from scratch in ObjC in OSX than port OO to meet the above reqs. No surprise there.

    • Re:I'm looking for an OASIS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @12:11PM (#11378871) Homepage
      I wonder if Pages was descended from Pages for NeXT:
      Article [simson.net] on it.

      I wonder what happened to that software?
    • I suspect you underestimate the amount of work necessary to port OOo to the Mac, natively. I've thought about contributing in a meaningful -- until I realized that it would require a massive time committment and more coding skills than I have just to get OOo to compile properly, let alone actually be useful. Even then, with 2.0 allegedly around the corner, much of the work would have to be repeated. Most of the OOo codebase, as far as I can tell, dates back to the mid-90s. I'm guessing it was easier for App

      • Even if you say "But wait! Apple would only release OOo on the Mac..." remember that someone will port it to Windows

        Are you under the delusion that Open Office doesn't run on Windows?

        If it's OS X you were thinking needs work, NeoOfficeJ will give you OoO on OS X without the need to install Apple X11. Not 100% integration yet but it's coming along.

        "Hey, Bill, it's Steve. Steve Jobs. How you doing? How's Melinda?... Yeah, I was just thinking... why don't you two take some time off, maybe have a cou

  • Looks like adding a photo to a page of text (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kinniken ( 624803 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:53AM (#11378788) Homepage
    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 ;-)
    • Does anyone know if there's inline PDF in keynote as well? (Add an image of some sort, and the text flows around it)

      This is a really important capability to the more mathematically inclined among us, who would like to have inline equations. The number of hours I have spent moving my equations around when I change the text is really disturbing.

      (Actually, if this works in any presentation software that runs on a mac besides LaTeX, I'd love to know about it. Especially if I can save slides as PPT for my advi
      • PDF is explicitly one of the "image" formats supported. It is also an export format (since this is MacOS X that was a given), and there is a rumor that it might also import PDFs as editable documents. Apparently one of the marketing directors said that in a presentation, but since it was a marketing guy, and he might not have understood that PDFs were only importable as semi-images, there is quite a bit of skepticism.

        And as to the money question. The answer is definitely yes: $79.
        • Ah, certainly it can import them (in fact there's a rather nice LaTeX equation editor that you can use to drag and drop), but Keynote 1 CANNOT have pdfs as inline images. (I asked someone on the development team.)

          If a pdf was inline, then I could just drop an equation in, say HERE, and keep editing. As the text moved around on the slide the equation would keep moving around with the text. Right now, one has to move ALL of the equations on a slide as one edits, as the text keeps moving around.

          I was hoping
      • Pages is a Cocoa application, so it supports Services. You can use the EquationService to generate PDF's of equations on-the-fly and put them into your pages document. So you get the best of both worlds. LaTeX's gorgeous equations with Apple's kick-ass word processor.
    • Use a text box.

      In Word 2003, if you highlight a picture and then click "insert -> text box", it will draw a text box around the picture.

      I'll agree that this is far more annoying that it should be. There should be an option to make this the default item for captions.

      OTOH, it's no more annoying that OOo slapping text boxes around all of my floating tables.
    • Whenever a new version of Word comes out, I'm always stunned that they haven't fixed basic failures like this one, in favor of more singing, dancing, flashing text. It's not intended as a desktop publishing tool, but just including a decent way to get illustrations to lay out properly in a multi-page document doesn't seem too much to ask.

      Then again, I haven't had much better luck with OpenOffice. I can't help but suspect that their primary goal is Word compatability, and that costs them the flexibility t

    • Looks like adding a photo to a page of text will be very easy in Pages, with the text adapting automatically.

      The text flow is done in real time, as was demonstrated during the keynote [apple.com]. It looks very slick.

    • one of my pet peeves with Word is how annoying adding a photo+legend to a page of text is.

      That's one of my biggest peeves with MS-Orifice and OOo/SO. It's a pity since Word (and clones as OOo Writer) have yet to come up with what was quite easy in a 13 year old verion of Island Write, which was:
      Create a container that can be locked to the page or text
      Set the container format to: crop; scale proportionally; scale non-proportionally
      Import graphics file
      If cropped, use "hand" cursor to move graphic in cont

  • Now the screen shots, and the ones on Apple's website look very pretty. However, one thing I have been noticing, looking at Word, Works, Open Office, AbiWord, etc. Although the quality of the icons are different, and there are subtle differences in usability, they all seem to be very similar.

    Do people think this is because we have evolved to the design to something which is useful and "optimal", or because people are no longer willing to change a paradigm which may alienate new users? Are there any wor

  • Office 2006 / Longhorn will copy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @11:55AM (#11378795)
    Whatever the next version of office will come out, I think MS will copy some of the features and look and feel (as much as they can and get away with it) of iLife '05.

    It looks like Apple did a beautiful job. Now I'm starting to think that getting a MAC would be a good idea.

  • When will taco learn..... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ....predicting gloom and doom again eh? Didnt learn from your iPod errors yet did you?

    Why am I not particularily surprised.

  • Reconsidering (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @12:01PM (#11378831) Journal
    I am reconsidering buying that Mac Mini now. The thing keeping me from having a mac was the price and lack of a reason to just do everything in Word on a PC. Apple has outdone itself.

    • Re:Reconsidering (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bogie ( 31020 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @01:23PM (#11379248) Journal
      Not to rain on your parade but if you need to deal with Word documents on a regular basis your going to need to spend as much as your Mac Mini costs to buy MS Office to remain compatible with Word. No app in world does .doc files perfectly so if you do lots of .doc editing get ready to spend $400.

      Don't get me wrong the app looks nice and the template are beautiful, but unless Apple hired the MS engineers who developed the .doc format you'll be just as stuck as you are with OO.org which has best of breed MS import capabilities and yet still can't format .doc files correctly.
  • One thing I hate about "templates" and "wizards" is you end up with the same document.. just your data.

    It seems like over 50% of companies use the same MS Word Fax Cover sheet. etc. etc.

    I wish someone would come up with some machine logic so that you design a template through a wizard, not just insert data.

    So your end product, is unique, catered to you, but still meets the objective.

    I know it wouldn't be easy... but please, no more cookie cutter wizards.

  • Its all Latin to me! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by macmurph ( 622189 )
    During the keynote, Steve Jobs said the Pages templates would be filled with greek text. I thought, what if you speak greek? Well now that I see the templates...It looks like latin to me! Can't he tell the difference?

  • It looks like you're writing an iLetter (Score:5, Funny)

    by WindFish ( 812433 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @12:29PM (#11378960)
    Without Clippy, Pages just doesn't seem as user-friendly.
  • Umm did they drop these modules or just no screenhots?

    And yes i have RTFA... as well as Apple's pages, but they arent overly informative on features ( unless the feature list really has dwindled to 2 modules )..
    • These modules (or really in iWork terms separate applications) are not in iWork 05. iWork 05 is the first step towards replacing AppleWorks. It is not yet a complete replacement. Look towards iWork 06 (in 2006 of course) to fill in at least one of these gaps. This is probably why the new Mac mini is shipping with AppleWorks not iWork 05.

  • Observed iWorks at MWSY 2005 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @01:18PM (#11379218)
    Keynote 2 seems to have far more efficient workflow than what I am accustomed to when working in MS PowerPoint. The visual qualitys are far better than what I am accustomed to seeing with Windows computers (edges, aliasing, effects, color, etc.).
    Pages is a word processing and limited, albeit very powerful, page layout application. Pages is excellent for writting papers, making small multi-page brochures, menus, etc. It is not a Quark / InDesign replacement and was not intended to be, as one of the UI designers stated to me at the exhibit ( I think he is telling the truth, as I did study at Uni with him and he has always been very truthful). Pages is not Word, there are several features currently absent from Word (as previously stated in this thread) that professional writers would need, version tracking is one of those features.
    Notice that there isn't a Spreadsheet application in the iWorks suite? Me too. However, Appleworks 6.x still has this functionality, and it imports most MS Excel docs, plus it is much cheaper than Excel (US$49.00, I think).
    By the way, there are several word processing applications available for Mac OS X: TextEdit (Apple), AppleWorks (Apple), Pages (Apple), Mariner Write (Mariner), Abiword, MS Word, and 2 applications by Nissus (there main App is feature rich / high end, the other very basic, more features than TextEdit). These are what I am aware of, please add to the list if I have not listed all.
    There are several Spreadsheet applications as well, Mariner Calc, a few from open source, AppleWorks (as listed earlier), and that MS Excel Application. Again, if there are any I have left out, please add these in.
    I do know that there is a java Office Suite applicaion available, I just don't remember it by name. The "open" office suite application that I have read about (sorry, I forgot its techy name)
    is not really an application for most Apple users, as it requires a rather cryptic installation process, not very apple-like, and so I would refer to it as a kind of prototype software, not ready for non-techys (I am refering to the majority of computer users out there who need to do work with their computers, not get their computers to work) those people who do not have the time or interest in learning how to make a computer work. These are the
    same people who do not upgrade thier refridgerators, TVs, washing machines, toilet, or water heater, unless they are broken, or want to re-model the house, these are the same people who buy software by the way. These same people are
    also the ones who fix that broken plumbing, electrical, and so
    on. ( Sorry had to rant a bit their as I read so much elitist garble
    on /. discussions.) OK, back on topic.
    It seems as though Mac OS X will have nearly as many USEABLE (whatever this really means I am not sure) office productivity applications as are available for MS WIndows users. Is this the same situation as well, where 95% of people use the dominant application and the remaining applications fight for market share scraps?
    I think variety is a very good thing, as is competition, so hopefully, these applications will find their respective niches and only have overlap in reading each others formats and basic features.
    Cheers!

  • Spreadsheet and Database Modules? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It seems to me that Apple has to tread very carefully with an office productivity suite, so as not to piss off Microsoft. Witness the step-by-step introduction of a browser (Safari), presentation app (Keynote), and now a word processor (Pages). The missing pieces of the puzzle of course, are a spreadsheet and database. I'm willing to bet that they're already working on a spreadsheet with the features and capabilities of Improv [wikipedia.org] which I've heard described as the best spreadsheet ever. It's also not a stretch

  • corrections... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @02:13PM (#11379494) Homepage
    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.

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by payndz ( 589033 )
    Finally a possible reason to upgrade from Word 5.1!

    Only one question: does Pages have a live wordcount? 'Cause if not, well, maybe I'll wait for iLife '06...

  • Now add Sheets... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @03:01PM (#11379753) Homepage
    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.

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