IJ Reilly said:
In that case, Pages should do for you -- it handles page layouts quite nicely. I have little use for InDesign since I started using Pages.
While I do think that Pages is a nice app... it isn't the app for me (I didn't use the NEXTSTEP version either).
When recommending page layout apps for clients usually I break up the recommendations into three areas:
beginners,
creative/mid-range/non-professionals and
high end/professionals.
For the
beginners the main thing I look for is either how much they want to actually do in terms of layout... and how they react to a blank page. Pages is a great app for over coming the
terror of a blank page that some people get when faced with a new app.
For
creative/mid-range/non-professionals I tend to recommend Create as it gives quite a bit of freedom, covers the areas of page layout , illustration and web design, while staying within a reasonable budget.
And for
high end/professionals it usually comes down to preference... InDesign or QuarkXPress. If either will do I usually recommend InDesign as it comes with Adobe's Creative Suite anyways.
bousozoku said:
Create is certainly an unusual solution. I didn't find it to be particularly usable but it had some interesting attributes. Of course, that could be applied to any NeXTStep-compatible applications.
Create solved many problems for me on a number of systems...
On my IBM ThinkPad running Rhapsody 5.1 I use
Create 5.1. There were few apps for Rhapsody and even fewer for Rhapsody for Intel. Create gives me the ability to do
page layout, illustration and
web design all in one app.
On my IBM ThinkPad while running OPENSTEP 4.2 I use
Create 5.2.1. In this case I have quite a few apps for doing different tasks... Diagram! for creating flow charts (it was the basis for OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle opens Diagram! documents), Concurrence for presentations and OpenWrite for word processing. Still I find myself doing page layout and illustration work in Create.
On my PowerMac 8600 running Rhapsody 5.6 I use Create 10.0. This version added a ton of features over Create 5 and made it much easier for me to get both my
page layout and web design work done. Plus it helps that the interface of the app is not that different from the current version for Mac OS X. Below is a shot from my 8600 from yesterday while I was working on a project.
On my PowerBook and PowerMac running Mac OS X I use
Create 12.5. Back when I was moving from Mac OS 8/9 to Mac OS X Create replaced both QuarkXPress and Illustrator for me. And it paid for itself (something all my apps must do). Not having access to Create is one of the things I miss the most when I use any of my Mac OS 8.6 systems.
Oddly enough, when I gave a presentation to a local Mac user group on web design solutions for Macs, people asked for more information about Create at the end... and it was one of a dozen apps I had talked about.
Also Create has been the first third party app for most versions of this operating system. It was (as TextArt) the first third party app for NEXTSTEP. It was the first third party app for Rhapsody (Apple gave Andrew Stone early access to Rhapsody so Create could be demo on Rhapsody at WWDC in 97). And it was the first third party app for Mac OS X during the developer previews. So in all those cases to do more than look at the OS, Create was the app you would turn too.
bousozoku said:
It's nice that Cocoa is there but it's good that NeXT interface standards aren't used for applications. That would kill Apple in the marketplace.
I guess I don't see the problem with NeXT interface standards... specially as the original NeXT interface was made by pretty much the same people who made the original Macintosh interface.
When switching back and forth between OPENSTEP and my other systems, the main thing that I have to get used to is the vertical scroll bars on the left side and the vertical menus (which I was never a fan of). Moving between Rhapsody and Mac OS 8/9 is very easy for me as, well, both got their GUI design from Copland.
The only NEXTSTEP app that I have never gotten a handle on was TIFFany... which while being a very powerful app, is completely unintuitive (specially for someone who is coming from years of working with Photoshop). I own TIFFany3 Professional but I still fired up Photoshop 6 in
Classic back before Adobe released 7.
Even today, anything that I can't do in ToyViewer, PixelNhance and CuttingRoom in Rhapsody on my 8600 will be moved to Blue Box and Photoshop 5.5 before I would fire up TIFFany3 (but that is very rare considering what I am usually working on in Rhapsody anyways).
Most of the time when people talk about
NeXT interface standards they are referring to apps by smaller developers. Illustrator, FrameMaker and WordPerfect all worked pretty much the same in NEXTSTEP as they did on Macs. In fact better in the cases of Illustrator and FrameMaker because the average screen size was much larger than on Macs of the same period. On actual NeXT hardware the vertical menus aren't nearly as bad as when you get restricted to 1024x768 on PC hardware/displays.
The comment I see most often from people who have started using Create for page layout is that it reminds them of PageMaker... which I tend to agree with. This may also be why I like using Create as I learnt page layout on PageMaker (and still use both 5.0a and 6.5 on my older Macs).
So yeah, for me, when TextEdit isn't enough... Create is the next app I turn to.
But TextEdit is usually where I do most things. In fact I just finished putting together my
RhapsodyAnswers (a collection of technical articles on Rhapsody) using TextEdit on my 8600. It is only now that I'm planning on making a single PDF document that I've turned to Create (which is what I was working on in the screenshot above).
Also, this post is the 23rd "untitled" document in TextEdit on my PowerBook (and one of 8 currently open documents). So I really do spend a ton of time in TextEdit.
