PC Mag Review of Apple iWork '05 133
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."
Pages not an Word competitor (Score:2, Insightful)
Not a moment too soon...
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:3, Informative)
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,
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:3, Funny)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 t
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:3, Insightful)
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/e
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:1)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:2)
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 t
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:2)
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 proces
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:3, Funny)
Well, it certainly kills me to use it.
Re:Pages not an Word competitor (Score:2)
Re:It needs a Windows version (Score:2)
Re:It needs a Windows version (Score:2)
And they especially wouldn't want to call it Yellow Box [brighton.ac.uk].
(I'm not sure whether it was ever released. The Wikipedia article on NeXT [wikipedia.org] appears to be saying some beta releases might have been made before it disappeared.)
Most important part of TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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 (Score:1)
Re:Most important part of TFA (Score:1, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Most important part of TFA (Score:2)
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 t
Re:Most important part of TFA (Score:2)
Re:Most important part of TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
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 us
Re:Most important part of TFA (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
And which applation did they write this in? Whose spellchecker actually works?
I'm not there yet. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Huh? (Score:1)
Early adopter (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
It's worked pretty well with iTunes so far.
Re:Early adopter (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:1)
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
Re:Early adopter (Score:2)
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 rec
Re:Early adopter (Score:2)
FYI: The Watson developer is now working at Sun on an unrelated, but cool(so he says) project.
Re:Early adopter (Score:2)
Re:Early adopter (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
Until then, I'm eagerly awaiting Dashboard.
Re:Early adopter (Score:1)
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 (Score:2)
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).
It's the interface, stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:3, Informative)
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 bum
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:2)
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.
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, I'll capitalize that for you. When do I get to pat the rabbits, George?
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:2)
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
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 j
Re:It's the interface, stupid (Score:1)
Death to the paperclip.
This reminds me of the old days (Score:2)
WordPerfect vs. Word
Also at MacCentral... (Score:2)
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 runn
Re:Also at MacCentral... (Score:2)
> processing without spending a fortune.
Have you tried publicon?
Re:Also at MacCentral... (Score:2)
I know - and they've been taunting me with a 'available very soon' [papyrus.de] for the English version for most of the past year...
I wish they'd hurry up and finish translating it!
Dear Apple, (Score:4, Interesting)
If this/these programs are in the works and simply waiting for Tiger's Core Data [apple.com] 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, (Score:2, Informative)
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, (Score:2, Informative)
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, (Score:2, Informative)
Dear valued customer, (Score:1)
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, o
Re:Dear Apple, (Score:2)
What database functionality?!? As far as I can tell, there isn't any at all.
Re:Dear Apple, (Score:2)
Re:Dear Apple, (Score:2)
Access works fine as a database
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
great programs (Score:4, Informative)
[O/T] Why I Love vi (Score:2)
And they say vi is hard to use.
Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess (Score:2)
Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess (Score:1, Informative)
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
Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess (Score:2)
Re:Worth it for Keynote, Pages a buggy mess (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Hits the Apple core! (Score:1)
Incidentally, the pos
Missing information (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Pages lacks a grammar checker (Score:2)
Re:Pages lacks a grammar checker (Score:1)
Re:Pages lacks a grammar checker (Score:2)
One nice thing about these tools... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:One nice thing about these tools... (Score:2)
Re:One nice thing about these tools... (Score:2)
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... (Score:2)
excellent security in word? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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. [com.com]
Re:excellent security in word? (Score:2)
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.
export to html (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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 pe
Lack of grammar checker is a *feature* (Score:5, Insightful)
Moral of the story: Grammar checkers -- when they even work -- perpetuate stupidity.
Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature* (Score:1)
--
(Yes, I'm joking...)
Re:Lack of grammar checker is a *feature* (Score:2)
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* (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post proves the point. (Score:2)
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:
This is a grammatical error. Subordinate clauses (ones that being with subordinating conjunctions like
Re:Your post proves the point. (Score:2)
BTW, no offense taken, or intended.
No Grammar Check? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:2)
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 profe
Re:No Grammar Check? (Score:2)
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
Re:No Grammar Check? (Score:2)
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 targ
Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0... (Score:3, Informative)
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... (Score:2)
Re:Keynote 2.0 is great, while Pages 1.0... (Score:2)
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 continuatio