Here's Tao's review of Apple's new Pages application, which is part of iWork '05. Much has been said about Keynote 2, mainly due to the fact that people are familiar with it and the changes between the two versions are quite noticeable.
Pages however keeps getting relegated to a few lines to tune of "Yeah its nice, but it won't replace Word" or "It is more of a layout application, but a probably a solid basis for future developments". Basically after spending some time with it Tao can safely say that people writing things like the above do not know what they are talking about. Pages is word-processing reinvigorated!
Read on for more...
Tao thinks the reason for the general tenure of "it's nice but lacking" is the lack of huge toolbars filled with buttons, when you open the app. Pages looks almost spartan compared to other word processors. If you however do View->Customize Toolbar you'll see there are plenty of buttons ready to be added to the bar, for the feature hungry. Opening up the inspector (the big "i" button) reveals a plethora of additional options and settings.
It includes document statistics (Word/Paragraph/Page counts etc.), what to include in the Table of Content, various layout options for graphics, text, lists and more, tables, graphs, links and many others. Pages can be named and easily shuffled. There are footnotes and bookmarks too. And of course extensive search and replace functionality (more and that in a second). So that takes care of most of the features a regular wordprocessor should have...what makes Pages so special?
Well two main things: Styles and Layout.
Styles first: Styles are a good way of applying colours, fonts, bullet-types, headings and other, well....styles to your document. Creating and redefining styles is really simple and uses a drawer docked to the window. But it doesn't stop there: right-clicking on a style allows you to select all content that uses that style, allowing you modify them all at once or switch them to another style.
Styles are used through the app. The search and replace functionality for instance can be set to only find within text that has a certain style and then replace that text with another text with a different style. Very neat! The Table of Contents also uses styles to decide which headings to include. This is like Word, but more visible (in terms of where the TOC comes from) and easier to modify.
Next, layout. Strangely enough several reviews I've read mention this as a sort of aside, like "Pages is more a layout program than a serious word processor". Wake up! This is 2005! Word processors need proper layout tools. And it is refreshing to see that Pages does this into a very straight-forward, well integrated way. Layout isn't an after thought, like it seems to be in Word. It is at the core of this application. It can do:
- Columns of any number and size
- Images and graphics, including transparent ones! You can import a PNG with a complex shape on a transparent background for instance, and watch the text flow around the object, not simply around the rectangle of the image.
- Live updating of everything. Resize an image or graphic dynamically. Drag it around and watch the text get pushed aside and reflow instantly. Rotation, column resizing, zooming etc. everything is live. The live text reflowing was demoed on BeOS (Beatware Writer, never shipped) years and years ago, but it now finally made it into a real shipping app!
- Embed media like quicktime movies and sound
- Integration with iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes to grab content from.
But better still then all these features is the way the layouting is implemented. When you switch to layout view you can see all the different elements of a page highlighted, ready for manipulation. With layout view off you can simply focus on writing text. If you then "Show invisibles" you can not only see line-breaks and spaces, but also section-, page-, column- and layout-breaks. This last one is what makes making complex layouts understandable and easy. Ever tried having Word do a complex layout? It is a nightmare. You change something in one place and it screws up everything. Delete one character and all of a sudden a whole header-styling disappears. Sure there are ways in Word to see what is going on, but it feels more natural in Pages. A layout-break simply means "stop the current layout style" (for instance 3 columns across with 1" of space between them). From there on you can continue with other styles as if it was a fresh blank page. Of course a layout break can occur anywhere on the page, not just at the end, thus enabling you to create pages with for instance 3 columns at the top followed by 1 column crossing the page, followed by 2 columns at the bottom. All in an easy to follow and reproduce way.
Of course content can be floated in text-boxes, which can also be linked together, so the second box takes on any content that doesn't fit in the first one. Of course resizing these boxes is live again, and the boxes can be made to interact with eachother and effect text-flow in the same way as described above for graphics. Oh! Was it mentioned that you can do discontinuous selections? Hold the Apple key and make several selections across your document and change them all at once.
There are simply too many neat features to mention in this app. One thing is very clear though: this is no simple toy and it deserves a lot more attention then it seems to be getting. Pages combines the best of "old fashioned" word processing and layout tools into one easy to use application. Perhaps those reviewers simply equate "easy to use" with "entry level application"...
On a final note: it has been suggested that Apple bought Gobe or the Gobe engineers to do this work. This might very well be true. The app feels like Gobe Productive improved and rationalized and with a new sleek interface. Some GP features are missing however, such as embedded clocks and bouncing balls, a spreadsheet, a paint-package and 3D graphs. Of all of these the spreadsheet is the biggest omission. Tao seriously hopes Apple is building one to complement Pages, and hopefully it will do the same for spreadsheets as Pages does for word processing. Perhaps they can take a cue from Quantrix!
I just saw a presentation from Apple's new Pages about the events happening in the middle east. The presenter showed us the Holy Bible and compared it with these events in the middle east. I thought, "hmm" "I think that the Bible is accurate to the detail. No other book in history can predict the future other than God's word." So I am going to read the thing very closly. Now I know that Jesus is real, and that He came to save us from hell. The bible says so! Cool, Huh? Here is what I found in the bible. God loves us so much, that He sent His Son Jesus to die for us, so we could live in Heaven and not hell. It also says, "He who confesses with his mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, and believes in his heart that God raised Him from the dead, will be saved." ALRIGHT!
Posted by: Henry Saltzer | March 17, 2005 at 06:13 PM