The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I use iWork and Pages regularly. I prefer its interface to Office (e.g., how you format text, page layout, etc.). The only caveat with Pages is that it's slow when working on large documents. The only thing that I'm hoping for with iWork '06 is that it has a significant speed boost!

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The question you should be asking is: is Apple really trying to supplant Appleworks?



I don't think so.



Appleworks was a real swiss army knife. Pages only really does one thing well: handouts and newsletters. It's not designed to be a real word processor; while I haven't tried the latest version, I can say that in iWork '05 if you tried to load a multipage plain text document in Pages performance began to go downhill.



Pages is just Apple plugging a hole in its lineup. There weren't any real contenders for the "QuarkExpress Lite" category, so it made one. Anyone who doesn't want to use Office, and who feels Pages is too limiting, could always download the free NeoOffice.

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I use Pages all the time if possable. It doesnt take as long to load as NeoOffice or Open office and I think it is much better than Word. The main reason I think it is better is that it doesent put everything in your face at once. Word has 1million and one different button always on screen where as pages has the Inspector which nicely catagorises everything.

Also I'm not sure I need a "Numbers" app now. Pages and Keynote have formula tables and charts. Yes ok you wouldnt want to keep accounts on there but for most tables I do they are to be put in a text document anyway.

I think i am tempted to get rid of my '05 version and get '06

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iWork is a solution looking for a problem. It's a good product for Apple to keep as a "Look, you can do neat stuff on a Mac" package, but its real world benefits are close to zilch. iWork is positioned right between two hard places: the office suites and professional tools. It goes to neither extreme well, and as an in-between product, it's doomed to languish in eternal obscurity.



The office suites will be one of the biggest software battles of the next five years, although some aspect of the battle is already decided. Microsoft will, eventually, lose the desktop office suite market to OpenOffice; there's a ceiling to how many features can be built into a desktop suite, and given the rapid pace of OpenOffice's development, it is certain to catch up before the end of the decade. Microsoft is certain to respond by taking Office online and adding collaborative authoring and editting capabilities. Whether or not OpenOffice will be able to mimic this will depend, in some part, on whether or not a major company is wiling to package OpenOffice as a free service. Google is in a position to do this, but has said as recently as a few months ago that they will not.



On the other side are the professional tools; Pages' counterpart here is InDesign and QuarkXPress; Keynote's counterpart here are the multitudinous presentation packages (things like MediaShout). Of these, Pages is arguably on par with its competition, but Pages is not, and likely will not be any time soon, if ever.



Where does that put iWork? It's software without a home. Businesses will use an office suite or a professional package; home users are likely to take home what they know from school and work - predominently office suites. Some home users may find significant benefit to authoring documents in Pages, but the number of them a) using Macs, b) willing to pony up $80 to do so, is not a statistically large group.



TUAW makes a valid point in comparing iWork to AppleWorks; as AppleWorks was a small, Mac-only niche product, so too will be iWork. Unless Apple seriously ramped up iWork development (to the level that they invest in OS X - see the similarity in sizes of Microsoft's Windows and Office divisions) and port it to be cross-platform, it's unlikely that iWork will ever make much of a climb on the popularity charts.

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Christian's comments are dead-on, and articulate perfectly the feeling I've had about iWork since its debut. It's middle-ground software where there is no middle ground, and is being offered because Apple feels obligated to offer *something.* Also, I think Dave is correct in thinking that is likely just a way to get AppleWorks retired for good.



One thing - in your third to last paragraph, I think you meant to say that Keynote is on par with its competition and Pages is not?

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I disagree with your posting. I have used Pages for medium size documents that eventually end up in Word. The export to Word, at least in my experience, is fantastic. The people that I collaborate with did not even know that I used something other than Word to create the document.



Pages is a bit slow at times, yes, but I rather take that anyday than the hickups that Word gets quite too often with crashes and documents that can't be read correctly.



And regarding the upgrade, the one feature that has kept me using Word is the commenting/reviewing features. While it does not appear that Pages has completely replicated (or improved) the features in this area in Word, it has at least provided the basic functionality. And this was something that was not available in AppleWorks.



Manuel

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My guess is that Apple has indeed been working on a spreadsheet app but that it wasn't ready in time for this release. The new "tables with calculations" feature of Pages is probably a result of that effort.



Who knows -- it's possible that the lack of an iWork '06 demo at yesterday's keynote was a way of shaming the iWork team for not completing Numbers on schedule. Another possibility is that Apple needed to back off on iWork to get Microsoft's guarantee of five more years of Office for OS X.

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I was not surprised at all by not seeing Numbers, or a spreadsheet type app. In my opinion, Pages does not equal Word, and it wasn't intended as a Word replacement. Pages took Word capabilities, and added a design oriented template system, I just don't see how that is possible for anything like Excel. Beyond that, Pages and Numbers (if it was just like Excel) seem to target different people. I, and many people, are probably interested in Pages, but have no need for Numbers. I think a lot of people who have Office use Word a ton, but rarely or never open Excel.



Also, I have use for Pages, and would really like it, but I just have no need for Keynote. It seems like Pages is set up for making family newsletters and various things that anybody can do. Do people make presentations just for fun? To show to their family? While Pages could fit into iLife, Keynote would not, so it seems that while Pages and Keynote do go together, in a way they don't.

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I feel like the problems most people have with iWork is Pages. To that end, I agree--Pages is a product for people who would like to make fliers and family newsletters easily and without a lot of technical knowledge. I'm pursuing my MS Office Specialist certification, and so I generally only use Pages if I need something I know will fit in one of the templates without a lot of hassle--Word on the Mac has never given me a lot of hiccups (I know, I'm a rare kid), so I prefer to work in there, simply because of familiarity.



Keynote is a different situation, though. I prefer Keynote to Powerpoint--it behaves better, for one, and I think Keynote is designed in such a manner that it's more difficult for regular users to make bad presentations. For example, MS PPT makes it very easy for would-be public speakers to apply a zillion transitions, animated graphics, charts, diagrams, and dreaded flying bullets to each slide. As a result, we get to watch pinwheeling text until our eyes hurt at department staff meetings the world over. Keynote, I've found, makes it harder to do that--it's got fairly inflexible templates already in place, and doesn't have a lot of the visual offensiveness of PPT (solid colors vs. "look! Balloons in the background!"). It won't guarantee a great presentation, but it does sort of funnel inexperienced/uninterested presentation makers towards better aesthetic choices. For that alone, I think it's a better program. Moreover, PPT's interface is clunky compared to Keynote--too many options are put in front of the user, most of which shouldn't be used.

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I really hope iWork 06 speeds up both pages and keynote, because I like both of these programs. If only Apple included them for free on new Macs ala iLife. I think many people would really like them if they had a chance (and a 30 day trial isnt good enough - most people don't bother because whats the point of learning a new interface if it runs out in a month?) Its a shame because they have great potential but obviously aren't the focus of development at Apple (esp with the move to Intel).



Keynote produces far superior presentations to PowerPoint - and makes it easy to do so by default (unlike many of the presentations I get to watch that have been slapped together in PowerPoint that look awful). PDF import is a big deal when importing graphs (usually stored in EPS format). Everyone is impressed with the cube transition (even in my scientific field where pretty much any animation or animated transition is frowned upon).



The biggest issue I have with both is that if you send something to the back, it is impossible to select again without doing a 'select all'. Especially in Pages when the typing text layer is on top.

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