Apple Developing Numbers?

[aegisdesign]

iDraw

Someone mentioned iDraw earlier.

Well, if you want a drawing application like ClarisDraw from the old days but updated to fit in with the iWork application style - here it is...

http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/

It's so Apple like, Apple could buy the company, drop it in to iWork and most people would think it had been an Apple program from the start.

 

[bwintx]

Sorry I haven't read any replies, I haven't got time right now, hence this could be repeating what someone already mentioned. But I remeber that the orignal iWork was supposed to havre a spreadsheet program called "Cells", who remebers that. Also it matches "Pages". For both of them its the medium in which you would input into. It also sounds a lot cooler.

Except that:

(1.) Lots of spreadsheet users have no clue what a "cell" is. They still call 'em "fields."

(2.) It's typical to think of a "cell" as either a small portable communications device or a really bad place to spend the end of a drunken weekend. 🙂

 

[nomore]

Sorry, but you really have no idea what you are talking about.

The fact that Apple had to release a .1 because there was no functionality to delete pages, and a .2 release to move pages--two pieces of functionality that are as common as typing--shows how rough Pages was and not ready for the market.

And this is not even considering the number of massive bugs.

Yes, Pages wasn't even beta quality. I don't know what Apple was thinking. But I assure you it has nothing to do with being comfortable with MSWord. Word sucks, and I, like other power users, wanted to switch to Pages the day it was released. But, Pages simply is not ready yet.

Here's hoping Apple gets their act together for v2.

MS Office in that case isn't even beta quality. There are numerous bugs which I can reproduce at any time in MS Word. For example, try this:

Create a text box.
Type "1. a" and then press return
Word starts an automatic list
next to "2. " type "b" and press return
next to "3. " type "c" and press return

Now... copy the text box and paste it below the first text box (on the same page)

The new text box will continue the list... e.g...
4. a
5. b
6. c

so far, so good.

Now print the document and compare the output to what you have on the screen.

I know this bug works in Word 2000, Word XP and Word 2003. I haven't tried it on the Mac version of Word yet.

 

[jocknerd]

Another half ass effort probably

Just like Pages. Come on Apple, if you really want to take on Office, put your weight behind OpenOffice. Don't come up with some proprietary product that can't share its data.

 

[chatin]

Pages may suffer the same fate as Pageperfect.

There was a unique DOS application called Pageperfect that was lanched in the late 80's, from IMSI. On paper it looked fantastic! But... in the marketplace it tanked. I bought it looking for a bargain and loved it.

It was clunky and tried to do too much all at once but the results were grand, in the days of very limited typography. When I loaded the Pages trial, I said to myself, this is exactly like Pageperfect. Now I find out it was on the Next burner during my college years!

Funny how life goes in circles. 🙄

 

[Disturbed]

Pages doesn't fit into what a nicely made Cocoa app from Apple should look like to me. It is not intuitive at all, taking a while for me to do anything with it. Apple needs to clean Pages up before i start to use it.

I agree 100%. The layout is awful. WHY won't Apple place toolbar buttons for font size, bold, type, etc??? None of the Apple apps have this and it drives me crazy. I should not have to go to hoops to make text bold.

 

[Jmitch]

Do we really want a spreadsheet from Apple?

I think we all agree that Apple needs to make their own office suite. Pages is good, but it's not dedicated to word processing. It is more of a publishing application. Or is it? What is wrong with Pages? Yes, we are missing the spreadsheet. But does Apple want to do a spreadsheet app? Doesn't Apple want to leave the boring and monotonous application work to other companies like Microsoft? I mean it's a spreadsheet application. It's not iLife.

 

[~Shard~]

I think we all agree that Apple needs to make their own office suite. Pages is good, but it's not dedicated to word processing. It is more of a publishing application. Or is it? What is wrong with Pages? Yes, we are missing the spreadsheet. But does Apple want to do a spreadsheet app? Doesn't Apple want to leave the boring and monotonous application work to other companies like Microsoft? I mean it's a spreadsheet application. It's not iLife.

Not a bad point. At least with Pages Apple was able to take the "mundane" word processing tasks and add some flavor and style to them that might appeal to more people, through more of a "publishing" and graphical angle as you said. With spreadsheets though, well, they are a little harder to "make fun" - a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet! Apple would have to do something like include templates, etc. for everyday tasks that Joe user might have (tracking purchases, etc.) to make it more appealing and user-friendly.

 

[kcwookie]

Pages works well for me

When I first looked at Pages I was very disappointed. I've used Word forever and was expecting something similar. After getting over the disappointment I actually started using it and found that I liked it better for many thing then Word 2004. I'm not ready to cut my strings to Office but I think Apple is headed in the right direction.

Bring on Numbers!

 

[Ti_Poussin]

Good news, I hope they will make it more powerfull than Excel for scientific. We are many that hate Excel for it's lack of 3D graphic drawing and better curve fit. In all, bring a good mathematical foundation in it please, a lot of people will rush just to be able to make derivate, integration and algebric expression graph in a spreadsheet. Excel it's a good piece of software as long as science is not your domaine, for economic calculation and database are strong points in is favor.

By the way I hate the toolbar and texte changing in Page and Keynote, hope they change this soon, cause it's really unproductive, make a bold texte or changing it's size is a real pain. The Inspector windows is unintuitive, it's slow to use. I hate it. It's sad cause the program itself is powerfull. I match Keynote with LiveType effect to make killer presentation, it's rock. But hope they change the interface for something more usefull. iWork is probably the worst GUI from Apple. Hope they fixe it soon, else this product will sink like a rock and will only piss Microsoft with there Office version.

 

[broken_keyboard]

Well, Pages was pretty disappointing, so it's hard to look forward to Numbers. But maybe they will grok spreadsheets in a way no else has, so you never know.

 

[InsiderTravels]

No hoops; just common sense.

I agree 100%. The layout is awful. WHY won't Apple place toolbar buttons for font size, bold, type, etc??? None of the Apple apps have this and it drives me crazy. I should not have to go to hoops to make text bold.

View > Customize Toolbar

 

[CmdrLaForge]

And Word is annoying, it does stuff i've not told it to do, Pages not.

If thats true its a reason for buying it. The formatting in Word can really get on somebodys nervs. This time my wifes. She hates it when Word is reformatting all the time.

I don't care because I work with Word for ages.

Cheers

 

[vanillaboy]

Great web software

Really the thing that iLife is missing, and I can't believe no one has mentioned it yet, is a basic web page creation program. AppleWorks was a great program, but lacked the ability for students to creat simple webpages. I figured that for sure iLife would have it, but nope.

As an educator, and feel I speak for many, there is no good, simple program out there for k-12 kids to use. Frontpage is terrible, and DreamWeaver is too advanced.

Have you tried Freeway by Softpress? Excellent app for websites, very easy to use.
http://www.softpress.com

 

[ssalerno]

iWork, Numbers etc

Folks,

let's get with the 'program"(s). Apple has set out to make an update to the venerable and still elegant , if dusty, AppleWorks. They created Keynote, which was a bang up piece of presentation software, weakly implemented in AppleWorks but in there, and then added Pages a Word processer/ Desktop Publishing Hybrid. Pages utilizes some of AW's WP app and a tiny bit of the Drawing app- layout capability- but with no drawing tools or painting and the DUMBER THAN DUMB font implementation, it pales by comparison to AW's capabilities. Numbers, if that is what they are calling it, may be a spreadsheet or as some have indicated a hybrid with a database component. It all really doesn't matter if they don't clean up the interfaces of all the programs. iLife is a masterpiece of integration, of form following function and integration. This "suite" needs to borrow from iLife's UI and get everything on a page, not popup menus that float and distract. I can use any iLife app on my 12 inch PowerBook with no problem. iWork makes "ease of use" a mess.
I also, agree with everybody that a Webpage tool that interfaces seamlessly with .MAc is also needed.

 

[jdurston]

People need to remember the price gap between Apple's and Microsoft's software. A lot of people complain that Pages doesn't have the functionality of Word. Don't complain if you didn't pay for Office.
I can easily write day to day documents for school and personnel use with Pages. I use both legally, but would never pay the several hundred dollar surcharge for word for what I actually need a word processor to do. Some people need it, but not me.

Software piracy tends to make people forget about the price of software and focus solely on the features.

 

[aegisdesign]

I agree 100%. The layout is awful. WHY won't Apple place toolbar buttons for font size, bold, type, etc??? None of the Apple apps have this and it drives me crazy. I should not have to go to hoops to make text bold.

What hoops?

Select your text, hit Apple-B, same as in pretty much any application.

Apple-Minus or Apple-Plus to make your text smaller/bigger. Not tricky really.

Or just leave the font inspector open at the side.

It's a different way of working to the MS Office applications. I personally don't think it's worse, just different.

However, it always tees me off that people use the bold button or font size thing in Word when I have to take over ownership of a document. It makes changing the styles throughout a document difficult. It's akin to using the FONT tag in HTML instead of CSS style sheets. I guess though if they don't understand the significance of using style sheets in either Word, Pages or with HTML then understanding Pages is beyond comprehension.

That sounds terribly snooty but I think the objections to the way Pages works is because it's not the type of application that suites the ComicSans font brigade. For such an entry-level priced application, it majors on doing things the 'right' way which is at odds with 'entry-level'. You have to think about how your document is structured and laid out or you run up against the 'delete page' thing where it deletes 17 pages because you've not created a new 'page' and just flowed text onto multiple pages. You won't get the most out of it just typing and colouring in as you go along.

If you're the type of person that uses stylesheets and templates then the interface works well. If you're used to clicking B or I or tabbing multiple times instead of using rulers and never uses styles then it doesn't.

The same thing happened with Word v Lotus WordPro (né Samna AmiPro) on Windows which was way ahead of Word in doing it 'right'. Word's stylesheet tools are execrable though so I guess users can be forgiven for not setting up stylesheets.

Once Apple add some more pro-level writers tools to the exceptional layout functionality, I think they have a winner, but not for Word users. I think it's a good example of thinking differently. If they'd just come up with a Word clone then there would be no point at all to Pages. They may as well have thrown in with OpenOffice. And I'd rather use MS Office on the Mac than OpenOffice. It's just horrible.

Have you tried Freeway by Softpress? Excellent app for websites, very easy to use.
http://www.softpress.com

...and produces very bad HTML containing layers and both inline CSS and FONT tags still.

This is 2005, not 1995.

It's a nice application to play with but it's almost as bad as Frontpage.

Folks,

Pages utilizes some of AW's WP app and a tiny bit of the Drawing app- layout capability- but with no drawing tools or painting and the DUMBER THAN DUMB font implementation, it pales by comparison to AW's capabilities.

It's the system font dialog, and so is the colour dialog for that matter too. It's standard across the whole OS. It's the same one used in TextEdit or any Cocoa app.

iLife is a masterpiece of integration, of form following function and integration. This "suite" needs to borrow from iLife's UI and get everything on a page, not popup menus that float and distract. I can use any iLife app on my 12 inch PowerBook with no problem. iWork makes "ease of use" a mess.

iLife applications are self contained things for the most part and don't require you to select fonts, colours or anything much really. Where they do, the results are pitiful.

In iPhoto, the only place you select a font is when creating a book IIRC, and that just gives you a pulldown for the font. I have a couple of hundred fonts so that gets a little tedious scrolling through it. I also can't do any of the fancy effects I can in the OS font dialog.

iMovie has the same stupid pulldown for fonts. The colour dialog is the standard OS one.

In iDVD the font selection is the same stupid pulldown and the colour selection is done using a pulldown with about 16 garish colours in and no way to choose anything else.

Meanwhile, criticising Pages/Keynote for using the OS default font and colour dialogues is just silly. They're also used by Safari, TextEdit, Grapher, iChat, Finder, ....

You could argue for better system dialogs perhaps.

I also, agree with everybody that a Webpage tool that interfaces seamlessly with .MAc is also needed.

Pages does do HTML export. It's not very good, but it would solve that need and I'm sure Apple will add seemless .mac integration.

 

[Jmitch]

Oh gosh I stopped using Word ages ago. I would use TextEdit over word any day. Everything it does just pisses me off. I quit Word a LONNNGG TIME ago. Word doesn't really go into my vocabulary anymore. As a matter of fact, anything Microsoft is really out of my vocabulary! 😀

 

[Doctor Q]

In Excel, see Insert->Function...->Lookup and Reference.

I use HLOOKUP & VLOOKUP all the time, and people are regularly shocked.

Why the lookup table needs to sorted in ascending order I'll never know. :-(

You can paint or do word processing in a drawing program, draw in a painting program, do some database operations in a spreadsheet, and even do some spreadsheet calculations in a database, but in general each of these functions deserves its own program (or component app within a suite) for all but the simplest uses.

By the way, whether or not values must be sorted for the LOOKUP functions depends on the "range lookup" parameter. If it is TRUE (or omitted), the largest value less than or equal to the source value is located, to determine the matching row or column. Excel could have been designed to do the sort for you in memory rather than require the cells to be pre-sorted when you do inequality matching, but I suspect that the likely performance hit to sort for every reference prevented them from offering that choice.

 

[w_parietti22]

This is Good. I dont really consider iWork a MS Office Killer more of an MS Office Backup. What happens if Microsoft just decides to kill its Mactopia section? What is Apple going to do? They need to have a backup for MS Office or else they will lose a ton of customers from just that. Sorry AppleWorks lovers but AppleWorks sucks and hasn't had an update in like I dont know how long. Its just not a good back up application for MS Office.It either needs to be completely redone, or make All new Apple computers come with iWork. That would also give a big leep on Windows XP because most computers comee with Home edition and Home edition doesnt come ith MS Office!

 

[Starfury]

OpenOffice

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would rather Apple devoted time and resource to helping the OpenOffice effort port the open-source office suite to run natively (i.e. not under X11) on the Mac.

The OpenOffice effort has a deeper foundation and is more evolved than anything Apple could create from scratch. Take this basis, and couple it with Apple's UI expertise there is a definite opportunity to create a best-of-breed software solution - for free - on the Mac.

If this isn't possible, then I'd recommend Apple rethinks its interoperability policy. The main reason I don't use Pages is that I have to import / export MS Word documents - the experience is not seamless...

 

[scu]

I always thought the problem was that people thought Pages was targetted at Word... and then were a little dissapointed. It's really great when used for it's intended purpose, but a Word killer, it is not (and is not intended to be).

It would be nice to see an alternative to Excel, but I have my doubts to how well it can be... hate Microsoft all you want, but Excel is pretty good at what it does...

<edit>

what would be nice, now that I think about it, is if apple did to Numbers what they did with pages - not targetting excel, but rather targetting the home user, and setting up an easy to use system, with templates that do what the average home user might want from a spreadsheet. I'm comfy using spreadsheets all day long, but if you sit my wife in front of one, she's dumbfounded as to what to do... but if Apple did it up right... it could be a very usefull tool, even for peeps like my wife...

I agree. I was very dissapointed with Pages. Apple will need alot more than Numbers to improve iWork.

 

[Zion Grail]

OpenOffice isn't capable of the stuff Pages and Keynote are. They aren't going to use it. They're going to continue to develop iWork with technologies that are OS X exclusive and make both applications capable of documents and presentations a whole hell of a lot slicker than anything MS Office can resonably produce, but do it with requiring comparitively minimal effort on the user's end.

 

[camomac]

They're going to continue to develop iWork with technologies that are OS X exclusive and make both applications capable of documents and presentations a whole hell of a lot slicker than anything MS Office can resonably produce, but do it with requiring comparitively minimal effort on the user's end.

i agree. that is the direction they need to go.

 

[Starfury]

i agree. that is the direction they need to go.

No diagreement from me either (in terms of "make both applications capable of documents and presentations a whole hell of a lot slicker than anything MS Office can resonably produce, but do it with requiring comparitively minimal effort on the user's end."). What I'd like to see, however, is a mature, feature-rich suite of software. Now, it seems to me that there are two obstacles to this: a) keeping MS onboard and b) R&D cost, time and effort. By simply porting an existing open source suite, which is feature rich, to run natively on the Mac, both of these risks would seem to be mitigated.

While I like Pages, I tend to default to Word for most stuff, despite the fact I'm not too keen on the user-interface on the Mac (the floating palettes just don't work for me). For this to change, Apple needs to make a whole host of changes around usability and compatibility.

On a different note, despite however much I love the Mac as a platform, I'm unwilling to move from one proprietary file format (.doc, .xls etc) which is to another which will tie me into Apple solutions for the short/medium term.