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Apple Updates iWork for iOS/Mac With Bug Fixes and Stability Improvements
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Apple is awesome... to get free OS upgrades and productivity apps for life after purchasing their totally reasonable and high quality hardware. You bet my next computer will also be a Mac
Be forewarned. Their "updates" are not always upgrades.
Team: Make the Office cool on our iOS.
Built: We would only do it if you keep your new iWorks sucks.
Team: Deal.
Built: We would only do it if you keep your new iWorks sucks.
Team: Deal.
That's fair, although inside I am gutted for you really. Converting the few .pages files I had when Pages was downgraded was a pain and I couldn't imagine being on any other format than .doc or .docx. Anything else seems to be asking for trouble nowadays, either the software becomes abandonware (and then eventually obsolete and lacking in new features) or Apple decided to yank features from their office software. But whatever works for you I guess.
(Can I ask why you hate Word though? Just out of sheer curiosity. I write for a living and I can't imagine writing in anything else now Pages' functionality has been reduced to that of MS Wordpad.)
Agreed. Office for me is not only the best and most feature complete office software but the safest when it comes to formats since there are only two types (old and new) and the vast majority of Office versions can open them both just fine.
that is a subjective judgement. what is objective is they are keeping my system up to date and for free. no subscription model here. you buy their hardware once and pretty much forever after that you have the latest (and to some the greatest).
I'm glad to hear that whatever Apple decides to give you is what you want and need. It's good to be content and delighted.
For the rest of us, the latest version of iWork is a downgrade. I don't think that I am alone in saying that it's fine for Apple to produce a reduced-function version of iWork for "free" but also offer an option to buy a more advanced version of iWork at a reasonable price that contains at least the same function set as iWork 09.
The problem with converting files from Pages (old) to Pages (new) is that the feature set of Pages (new) is reduced from the previous version. I had migrated from Pages 1.0 to Pages 4.x without any issues. I wasn't asking for trouble and did not have any until 5.0. And I don't know how I could be more clear in saying that this does not work for me.
From Day One, the entire design philosophy Microsoft has used for Word was to cram as many features into it as possible, with little regard for how important those features are to the core functions of a word processor, or for how well they were implemented. This is how you get awful concepts like the ribbon bar. At one point in the evolution of Word, these bars took up about a quarter of the screen real estate. This is the result of nobody taking charge of UI design.
I constantly see the results in Word documents. Apparently almost nobody who uses Word has the first clue about how to style paragraphs or text, for example. This is because Microsoft's consistently poor implementation of this core feature of a word processor. In fact a great many people would be better off using WordPad. They are trying to drive a semi-tractor to the supermarket.
I also write for a living. Most of my raw writing is actually done in in TextEdit, which I find to be perfect for this purpose. Final documents are completed in Pages, which until the recent downgrade, was pretty close to perfect for that purpose.
And again, I am not defending Apple's decision to reduce the feature set in Pages. Far from it. Some of the features that were most important to me, and unique to Pages, are now gone. I understand why Apple did this, but I still think it was a very poorly considered decision.
Often when sw takes the leap to completely new underpinnings some old features are unavailable for some time during the transition but then resurface once the new system is built upon. Sometimes you have to take a step back before taking two steps forward. Being a software developer I can appreciate this. Apple is clearly shifting their development across a number of their old code bases right now to give them fresh life in the cloud and to take advantage of some of the more recent advances, but you need to take a longer term view of it to appreciate it.
True, but many of the features that people are complaining about are basic features. Remember that they originally launched in October without a customizable toolbar. Really? Side-by-side pages? Also, I have my doubts about whether Apple wants to make iWork a power suite. I feel like it's about where Apple wants it. Simple and adequate for the vast majority of users. I hope they prove me wrong, but it doesn't look good.
Looks like I'll be installing iWork 09 onto my new MacBook Air running Mavericks. My designer colleague informs me that the more recent version of Pages isn't too compatible with Adobe InDesign and that while 09 has its own export issues, it generally works acceptably for him. Thus I've been politely requested to stick with my old Pages 4.1. I wonder what we'll be using in two, three years' time?
Heh. That's fair, just curious. I love Word and the ribbon personally, so simple to use and yet very powerful (and of course you're rarely dicked about with compatibility or dropped features). But I agree with you that most people would be better off using WordPad, Office has some hardcore features that are best kept away from sight of the average users. But I fully disagree that Word's design philosophy is all wrong, if anything, it is perfect once you get used to the ribbon. (And just so you know, the ribbon is easily hidden for them like me who dislike the clutter until it's actualy needed. Word can be reduced to a simple blank page and blinking cursor in a couple of clicks.)
I have read otherwise, in comments in threads right here at MR, so considering this and the fact that we won't really know until the public release, I will withhold judgement. Even then, the issue will be the relatively small number of people who are using iWork '09 with Yosemite, and fewer still who are deep enough into its features to draw an informed conclusion.
I don't know how to define an "average" user. I write for a living, and yet I have no use for a great many of the features of Word that some find to be so essential to their daily lives (such as an equations editor). I hear over and over again how any word processor without some of these frankly obscure features is unsuitable for "professional" use.
Without getting too deeply into software design philosophy, I see the ribbon bar as a perfect example of what a software designer does to accommodate feature cram, when they can't or won't prioritize features based on their importance. Yes, I know you can get used to it, and also that the bar can be customized. If you ask me, clutter should never be needed. And the fact remains, most people won't bother editing their ribbon bars, and will continue to turn out poorly-formatted documents because the tools for formatting a document in Word are not as easily accessible as they ought to be. They never have been.
This feature in particular is one of the reasons I liked Pages from the start. It provides the most accessible formatting tools I have seen since WriteNow. The sad part is I often have to explain to Word users why formatting paragraph and character styles is such a powerful and important feature of a word processor, presumably because so few Word users ever figure out how Microsoft would have them do it.
As a freelance editor I receive a great number of Word files (mainly from Windows users). The majority of these submissions lead me to conclude that the originators have almost no idea how to use Word. Formats are usually default. And when I ask people to activate smart quotes they have no idea what I'm asking for. Even a writer who'd worked as a regular contributor for a regional newspaper, and for some years, responded blankly regarding my smart quotes request. I was left merely scratching my head in bemusement.
I agree with IJ Reilly. The philosophy and psychology of software design and use is certainly relevant. For example, I have enjoyed using Apple's word processing software since the 90s because of its clean, simple and elegant solutions – aesthetically and in productivity terms – to my work requirements. It's why I use Macs, in fact: for Apple's invariably elegant solutions. Word is most certainly not that, and I don't need the seemingly excess of options that it places inelegantly onto my desktop.
Of course, with the current Pages, Apple has dropped the ball somewhat.
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Entire documents set to "Normal" style and every paragraph formatted by hand, usually badly. I have seen this hundreds of times. In fact I've rarely seen anything else. Word has succeeded in turning our powerful computers into typewriters. Maybe it isn't entirely Microsoft's fault, but if I'm asked why I don't like Word, all of the clueless Word documents I've been forced to look at over the years is among my main reasons.
I hear you pain, but I honestly believe that you should get on top of this now and not later. You can't hold on forever.
Last year I moved hundreds of APPLEWORKS DRAWING documents into new formats and it was a pain in the @#$%. There is/was a company that provided a solution, but for my usage it wasn't quite the end solution I was looking for, so I decided to redo them one by one. It wasn't so much that I was missing features (although that did happen), but the time involved. The silver lining was the fact that I vastly improved all my docs and it spurred me on to innovate and create better, more interesting ideas.
Perhaps you can look at it this way??? I much prefer the docs I have now compared to 2 years ago.
Anyway, good luck.
What software did you decide to use to recreate those AppleWorks drawing documents?
Thanks, but at this point I don't see anything I want to migrate to, nor am I interested in climbing yet another learning curve. So I suppose I will hold out the long shot hope that Apple will not abandon their base of veteran users entirely.
I can report that iWorks '09 Pages 4.1 still very much alive and functional with Yosemite in dev preview. I don't expect that to change.
So Macs sold by Apple after Yosemite's official release won't physically be capable of re-installing a pre-Yosemite OS like Mavericks?
(p.s. I'm using Mavericks and extremely happy with it right now)
Not a unanimous verdict.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1758500/
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This has already been discussed in this thread, the basic answer being no, it is not something you can count on working.
I am no Word power user (I want to learn it better though), but it does have some powerful features and outlining capabilities, but I agree with you about Pages. What made me love pages was its tight and refined UI. It had many complex features, but they weren't all in your face. This is one reason I dislike Pages 5. The giant sidebar is like a dumbed down ribbon on the side.
P.S.: I'm one of those people who start with "Normal" and mold it to my likings. I would have learned more, but I never wanted to spend the time learning all these features though out the menus and ribbons when I could just use Pages (which I became very proficient in). I just started from the default and worked form there because Word just didn't seem too friendly and didn't really encourage creativity.