Apple's iWork Selling Well

[gauchogolfer]

Sorry but it is true. PDF/X does indeed fix many of the issues, but you are rewarded by quality degradation, which for me makes it not an option.

Here's an example of Pages excellent PDF export capabilities...
Showing the same PDF created by Pages in Acrobat 7.0.5 and in Preview:

http://www.caffeinatedconsulting.biz/apple/pages/pages.html

So, on the link above, you give examples of pdf output from Pages as viewed by both Preview and Acrobat, is this right? It seems to me that the image quality is quite different for the two, and looks to be better in Preview. Is this a sign that the problem is with Acrobat?

I've exported some pages from Pages to pdf, and am usually pretty content (with the exception of very detailed bitmap images, which don't ever translate well), since the pdf even preserved html links and the like which I've incorporated. I'll have a look myself to see if there is a difference in output when viewed using Preview and Acrobat Pro 6 (my only version).

 

[aegisdesign]

Sorry but it is true. PDF/X does indeed fix many of the issues, but you are rewarded by quality degradation, which for me makes it not an option.

Ultimately you have to flatten the PDF v1.5 capabilities somewhere be that in Pages, Preview, Acrobat Reader or your printer driver. PDF/X is a subset of PDF guaranteed to be supported. If you want your document to be read by old none PDF v1.5 compliant readers then you've no choice but to flatten down to PDF/X and lose some of the features that make PDF v1.5 great. It's NOT Pages' fault. It's outputting good PDF to spec.

Here's an example of Pages excellent PDF export capabilities...
Showing the same PDF created by Pages in Acrobat 7.0.5 and in Preview:

http://www.caffeinatedconsulting.biz/apple/pages/pages.html

Other than Acrobat's poor font rendering - which is a problem with Acrobat and the flattened shadow being darker than in Preview your point is what exactly? All it shows is that Acrobat isn't as good as Preview. Nothing to do with Pages at all.

 

[aegisdesign]

Take Apple's mail as the base, stick in iCal, Address Book, a today screen, and iSync and we've got the best PIM in the world. See below and fill in the blanks.

Sounds like the worst PIM in the world to me. I like them all separate thanks. 90% of the time I only need Mail so the other two stay closed and out of the way on my dock. And IMHO Apple's last Mail interface is the worst interface they've ever done. Bring back the drawer!

 

[PlayUltimate]

memories...

I used to use WordStar back in, oh, '86-'87. How's that selling these days?

Ahhhh...the good old days of Multimate, Ashton-Tate's Framework & dBase III (back then I had a single disk PC with 640 kBytes of RAM). Anybody for a game of Rogue?

 

[PlayUltimate]

Well said. I've never really liked the way Word did it's formatting and stylesheets back as far as I remember. Back on Windows I used to use Samna AmiPro which later became Lotus' WordPro. That used to have a kind of document inspector and excellent style sheet handling too. I find long time MS Office users seem to have many problems using Pages as it's 'done right' IME and not the MS way. Given a willingness to change how you work and think about how your document is structured and formatted, Pages has hidden depths that a casual Word user won't appreciate. If you're the type of Word user that goes through your document using the font menu instead of the stylesheet then perhaps you should relearn your habits. In the web design world I find the difference between Word and Pages about as profound as HTML with FONT tags embedded and XHTML and CSS. Word is old. Pages is new. Some people can't cope with new.

Pages 2 also moves the bar set by Pages 1 further on. It's not a radical change but they've concentrated on fixing most of the things that were a little clunky in v1 and it's quite a bit faster at longer documents than v1.

I wonder if we won't see a link between Pages/Keynote and Grapher at some point to solve the scientific equation desire from some users. At the moment, Grapher allows you to copy the equation and graph to the clipboard and paste it into Pages. I'd be surprised if they didn't integrate Grapher into Pages directly.

And a spreadsheet is inevitable. I was really surprised 06 didn't include one although I still think iWork06 is incredibly good value for the two programs included in the 'Suite'.

06 is a solid upgrade rather than something spectacular. Here's hoping 07 brings the remainder of the 'Suite' - a semi decent spreadsheet, integrated Grapher and maybe a database app - which incidentally, MS Office lacks.

It sounds like everybody really wants an upgrade to Apple Works. If they just tweaked the Word Processor and the Presentation stuff on Apple Works to somewhat match Pages & Keynote isn't that the "ideal" system?

MS is not worried at all about apple. They could crush apple in a second. HOW? My not making office for mac. Sorry, but in the educational and corporate markets, 100% compatibility with office is necessary. When I email a document to my coworkers, it must be 100% compatible. Same with PPT. This is the problem that apple will always have. Believe me, apple needs MS to keep making office. Now, all the Mac-faithful who are disillusioned will criticize this, but not those in a corporate market. Apple will always be ok for artists, but to gain real market share, they need to continue to have office. And that is why apple and MS are inexorably linked.
Just one person;s opinions

FOr what it is worth, the apple products are the best for movies/video/music. But for corporate work, there are problems.

You are 100% correct. Further, Microsoft needs Apple to avoid the anti-trust folks. If Apple was not around, we may have seen an ATT-type break-up long ago.

 

[digitalbiker]

iWorks not really a viable office suite

I bought Keynote 1.0. Later upgraded to 2.0 and last year. Ended up buying iWork'05. I have used both Keynote and Pages extensively.

Personally I like Keynote but it is limited compared to PowerPoint. It does make some really beautiful simple presentations really well but for complex presentations it falls flat and really isn't compatible with PowerPoint when you need to share it with a windows user.

Pages, just plain sucks. It is the worst piece of software I have ever used. It is slow. Hangs very bad. It is buggy. The templates are a pain to use unless your needs are directly addressed. Large documents, over 100 pages with graphics should not be constructed in pages. No indexing, no correction following, it is OK for the home newsletter but forget it for real word processing or publishing.

My opinion is that Apple would be better served to drop the officesuite idea. Instead they should work very hard not to lose the Mac Business Unit of MS for writing MS Office on the Mac. Frankly if they lose MS then the only way to have a decent office suite will be running MS Office in VPC on the new intel macs.

 

[kwajo.com]

Pages, just plain sucks. It is the worst piece of software I have ever used. It is slow. Hangs very bad. It is buggy.

while the new version of iWork won't install on it, I have had iWork 05 installed on my iBook (specs in my sig.) for a year and it works wonderfully! It's faster than Word and has never crashed on me. Needless to say I was very impressed with its compatibility with such an old machine.

 

[Zatko]

So, on the link above, you give examples of pdf output from Pages as viewed by both Preview and Acrobat, is this right? It seems to me that the image quality is quite different for the two, and looks to be better in Preview. Is this a sign that the problem is with Acrobat?

I've exported some pages from Pages to pdf, and am usually pretty content (with the exception of very detailed bitmap images, which don't ever translate well), since the pdf even preserved html links and the like which I've incorporated. I'll have a look myself to see if there is a difference in output when viewed using Preview and Acrobat Pro 6 (my only version).

Since PDF is an Adobe product, I would consider Acrobat the standard for viewing them. Using preview is like opening up a Word document in Open Office. I'm saying Preview and Pages is behaving like Internet Explorer does in regards to Web standards.

Ultimately you have to flatten the PDF v1.5 capabilities somewhere be that in Pages, Preview, Acrobat Reader or your printer driver. PDF/X is a subset of PDF guaranteed to be supported. If you want your document to be read by old none PDF v1.5 compliant readers then you've no choice but to flatten down to PDF/X and lose some of the features that make PDF v1.5 great. It's NOT Pages' fault. It's outputting good PDF to spec.



Other than Acrobat's poor font rendering - which is a problem with Acrobat and the flattened shadow being darker than in Preview your point is what exactly? All it shows is that Acrobat isn't as good as Preview. Nothing to do with Pages at all.

If the whole world used Preview, I wouldn't have any issue at all. Unfortunately, I can't release PDFs to the public where to the vast majority of users (windows+acrobat) will think I was on crack when I wrote the document.

Also, don't get me wrong, besides the problems with PDF exporting... I love Pages. I love it so much that that is the reason why these PDF quality issues really make me upset.

I can say Pages prints beautifly.

 

[digitalbiker]

while the new version of iWork won't install on it, I have had iWork 05 installed on my iBook (specs in my sig.) for a year and it works wonderfully! It's faster than Word and has never crashed on me. Needless to say I was very impressed with its compatibility with such an old machine.

I have two seperate pages documents each with 55 pages. One table per page with 2 small jpegs per page and they will take at least 3-4 minutes for your machine to open.

In addition one of the documents contains 55 slighlty larger imbedded images and it takes about 5-6 minutes to open. Once open if you scroll either document it takes 1 minute for the window to re-draw and the beachball to stop spinning.

If you unlock or lock, group or ungroup, again it takes 1 minute for the beach ball to stop.

Pages is the worst piece of crap I have ever owned and I have used many different word processors / page setting / desktop publishing software on the Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, IBM 8087, Apple IIe, etc. etc.
Anything is better than Pages.

All of this is on a 1.67 Ghz G4 with ATI 9700 GPU and 1 GB of Ram, 100GB 7200 RPM HD.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Personally I like Keynote but it is limited compared to PowerPoint. It does make some really beautiful simple presentations really well but for complex presentations it falls flat and really isn't compatible with PowerPoint when you need to share it with a windows user.

I agree that Keynote 2 was somewhat unnecessarily limited (no multiple bulleted lists on one slide, no split-bulleted builds, etc.) but I have given presentations at several conferences using KN2 to good effect. I'm not using audio/video in these, but I'm guessing it's easier here than in PPT. As for PPT compatibility, it's only the fancy transitions that I've had problems with. Support for that has to come from MS.

BTW, the problems in KN2 I listed have been fixed in KN3, and I'm a very happy upgrader.

I have two seperate pages documents each with 55 pages. One table per page with 2 small jpegs per page and they will take at least 3-4 minutes for your machine to open.

In addition one of the documents contains 55 slighlty larger imbedded images and it takes about 5-6 minutes to open. Once open if you scroll either document it takes 1 minute for the window to re-draw and the beachball to stop spinning.

If you unlock or lock, group or ungroup, again it takes 1 minute for the beach ball to stop.
All of this is on a 1.67 Ghz G4 with ATI 9700 GPU and 1 GB of Ram, 100GB 7200 RPM HD.

I have the same system as you (15" Pbook, 80GB HD though) and I'm interested in trying this out for myself....though I don't have a file this large in front of me. Any way to download your file so I can take a look? If this isn't kosher, do you know of any publicly available documents I could try?

EDIT: Is there an easy way to convert pdf to rtf or .doc format so that I could open it in Pages? My dissertation is pretty large and might bog Pages down. It's in LaTeX with pdf output though.

EDIT: So, I found TextLightning to do pdf to rtf conversion: http://www.metaobject.com/Products.html#TextLightning
Testing 150 pages now....

EDIT: OK, so TextLightning is crap...none of the graphics are included, and tables in RTF are shot to hell. Never mind, time for bed.

 

[aegisdesign]

Since PDF is an Adobe product, I would consider Acrobat the standard for viewing them. Using preview is like opening up a Word document in Open Office. I'm saying Preview and Pages is behaving like Internet Explorer does in regards to Web standards.

Actually, it's more the other way round. Acrobat Reader is like Internet Explorer - it has 90% of the market yet renders the standards badly. Really. Stick a Pages generated PDF through a decent RIP that supports PDF v1.5 properly and you'll see output that more closely matches Preview and Pages.

Adobe may have created the standard but so far they've not produced a rendering engine on the Mac to touch Apple's. So yes, that means flattening to PDF/X in iWork '05.

As I said earlier though, Apple seem to have realised the problems in iWork 06 which renders PDFs to the PDF v1.4 specification. I suspect that will 'fix' most compatibility problems between Acrobat and Pages/Preview.

 

[bbyrdhouse]

That may be so, but it's quite a bit faster than Keynote and Pages. Speaking of which, has Apple improved the speed in the most recent release of these programs? I would consider upgrading from iWork '05 if they had...

Whaaaat! Keynote and Pages both are way faster than OpenOffice. I don't know how you could say imply that they were slow.

There was a day when I really "rooted" for Oo, but over the last couple of years progress has slowed a great deal. It seems that every since Star Office 5 (later Oo) they keep saying that they can almost do MSWord, but they never get any closer. Sorry, but MSWord is still better than Oo.
And Pages is more like taking MSWord and MSPublisher and mixing the two. In my opinion Pages is a much cleaner and easier to use program than either Word or Pub, but for compatability it's hurting.

If you are looking for a really nice Word Processor for Mac then check out Mellel from Redlix. Really nice with loads of features.

 

[aegisdesign]

I have two seperate pages documents each with 55 pages. One table per page with 2 small jpegs per page and they will take at least 3-4 minutes for your machine to open.

In addition one of the documents contains 55 slighlty larger imbedded images and it takes about 5-6 minutes to open. Once open if you scroll either document it takes 1 minute for the window to re-draw and the beachball to stop spinning.

If you unlock or lock, group or ungroup, again it takes 1 minute for the beach ball to stop.

Pages v1 was slow with some large documents. The key to not making it slow was to create a new page for each page rather than letting text just flow across 50 pages. Anything that meant the text would have to reflow 50 pages meant a beachball for ages while each page was reflowed. On v2 I've not had the same issue but it's still quicker with nicely defined pages and sections.

As a counterpoint. I've just created a 300 page document in Pages v2 by cut and pasting 10 pages at a time created from the 'EXTREME' newsletter template as seen on Apple's website. It opens in about 15 seconds on my iMac G5 1.8Ghz with 1GB. It'd be faster but I'm printing 500 leaflets just now and don't want to interrupt it. ;-)

Pasting 100 pages at a time beachballs for about 25 seconds which seems acceptable. I get no beachballs at all paging through the document, resizing or moving images such that a page insert due to an overflow occurs.

Pages is the worst piece of crap I have ever owned and I have used many different word processors / page setting / desktop publishing software on the Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, IBM 8087, Apple IIe, etc. etc.

Oh come now, you must not have used Wordworth. That was slow compared to WriteNow! ;-)

The first Pages v1.0 was a bit iffy. v1.02 was ok if a little slow and they should have had another version to fix some issues before v2. Otherwise it was solid and reliable for me.

v2 seems to fix the slowness. The thumbnail bar is great now. It's in some ways what v1.0 should have been. It does far too much in real time incurring massive CPU costs - do we really need to see an image moved in realtime with text flowing and shadows being generated as it moves? However, that aside, I think it's a cool little wordprocessor and layout program now. I much prefer it to Word since it does what I tell it and I'm not scared of doing any kind of complex layout in it unlike Word where I've managed to get a document into a state that I can't load again without an instant crash.

 

[sushi]

Pages v1 was slow with some large documents. The key to not making it slow was to create a new page for each page rather than letting text just flow across 50 pages. Anything that meant the text would have to reflow 50 pages meant a beachball for ages while each page was reflowed.

Interesting work around.

But doesn't that defeat it as being used as a word processor?

 

[digitalbiker]

Pages v1 was slow with some large documents. The key to not making it slow was to create a new page for each page rather than letting text just flow across 50 pages. Anything that meant the text would have to reflow 50 pages meant a beachball for ages while each page was reflowed. On v2 I've not had the same issue but it's still quicker with nicely defined pages and sections.

As a counterpoint. I've just created a 300 page document in Pages v2 by cut and pasting 10 pages at a time created from the 'EXTREME' newsletter template as seen on Apple's website. It opens in about 15 seconds on my iMac G5 1.8Ghz with 1GB. It'd be faster but I'm printing 500 leaflets just now and don't want to interrupt it. ;-)

Pasting 100 pages at a time beachballs for about 25 seconds which seems acceptable. I get no beachballs at all paging through the document, resizing or moving images such that a page insert due to an overflow occurs.




Oh come now, you must not have used Wordworth. That was slow compared to WriteNow! ;-)

The first Pages v1.0 was a bit iffy. v1.02 was ok if a little slow and they should have had another version to fix some issues before v2. Otherwise it was solid and reliable for me.

v2 seems to fix the slowness. The thumbnail bar is great now. It's in some ways what v1.0 should have been. It does far too much in real time incurring massive CPU costs - do we really need to see an image moved in realtime with text flowing and shadows being generated as it moves? However, that aside, I think it's a cool little wordprocessor and layout program now. I much prefer it to Word since it does what I tell it and I'm not scared of doing any kind of complex layout in it unlike Word where I've managed to get a document into a state that I can't load again without an instant crash.

Well, it sounds like maybe it would be worth purchasing iWork 06. Just to get an update of Pages.

Did Keynote get much of a bump with the new version? I doubt that I would have any use for iWeb. I already use Macromedia's software suite for web site design work.

I have liked using keynote for simple and fast but yet professional looking presentations. Also it is kind of nice to pull up a theme that the windows crowd using PowerPoint hasn't seen.

 

[aegisdesign]

Interesting work around.

But doesn't that defeat it as being used as a word processor?

Not really.

If you just pasted in 50 pages of text then it caused an issue in v1. If you used sections and pages as intended with Pages then it was fine. Usually, you'd not have a 50 page section though.

 

[maya]

Most of this is due to patronage and easy of use. I mean come on how long have we been at the word processing game, it should not take long to give the public something usable after the initial version 1.0 release which is usually a tester anyhow.

 

[aegisdesign]

Did Keynote get much of a bump with the new version? I doubt that I would have any use for iWeb. I already use Macromedia's software suite for web site design work.

I've never used PowerPoint. Keynote I've used a couple of times but it's instantly more professional looking than any PowerPoint presentation I've had the misfortune of having to sit through. From the reviews I've read, v3 is quite an update over v2 and the brief play I've had with the new templates and effects look nice - there's a really nice reflection effect in 3D. On the whole though I never use presentation software in presentations.

iWeb is part of iLife, not iWork. I've no use for iWeb or Macromedia's software either for that matter past simple prototyping or where a client insists on it. I always hand code sites. I guess I should be using TeX for writing documents too but there's only so much time in the day eh?

 

[digitalbiker]

I've never used PowerPoint. Keynote I've used a couple of times but it's instantly more professional looking than any PowerPoint presentation I've had the misfortune of having to sit through. From the reviews I've read, v3 is quite an update over v2 and the brief play I've had with the new templates and effects look nice - there's a really nice reflection effect in 3D. On the whole though I never use presentation software in presentations.

iWeb is part of iLife, not iWork. I've no use for iWeb or Macromedia's software either for that matter past simple prototyping or where a client insists on it. I always hand code sites. I guess I should be using TeX for writing documents too but there's only so much time in the day eh?

That's right. I was confusing iLife with iWork.

It irritates me that Apple didn't bump Pages once before offering iWork 06. I had purchased Keynote and used it fairly often. So when iWork 05 came out I decided to give it a try since it bumped Keynote a little and gave the initial offering of Pages.
Unfortunately I have not found Pages V1 useful at all. It creates a nice looking final product but I thought that the speed problems and formating problems were a pain to work through. If Apple would have bumped Pages a little to fix the problems in V1 yet left out a few of the new features that went into V2, it would have been a better deal.
Now a user is confronted with buying the whole suite over just to bump Keynote a little and to get fixes for a fairly poor v1 Pages app.

 

[Project]

Well to be fair none of the iLife apps (iTunes not counting) get a bump during the year. It is of course to make the yearly update seem very nice and encourage you to empty out another bit of cash.

I get iWork for £30 via student discount. Absolute bargain. Keynote envisions exactly what Apple home products are about and I am looking forward to giving my first presentation at University in a months time. Its kind of like my secret weapon because I know for a fact it is going to turn heads in a room full of powerpoint users.

As for Pages, I really liked 1.0, and 2.0 has pretty much cemented its position as my only word processor in use. I dont need much compatibility with Word (though it handles imports nicely) and I wont be writing any 100 page documents anytime soon. Mainly just the ability to export to PDF to print out at the campus IT suite. Theres something about it though...it just *feels* much nicer than Word and even Mellel. Applying styles is a breeze. Im definitely looking forward to exploring the spreadsheet feature too.

 

[digitalbiker]

Well to be fair none of the iLife apps (iTunes not counting) get a bump during the year. It is of course to make the yearly update seem very nice and encourage you to empty out another bit of cash.

I get iWork for £30 via student discount. Absolute bargain. Keynote envisions exactly what Apple home products are about and I am looking forward to giving my first presentation at University in a months time. Its kind of like my secret weapon because I know for a fact it is going to turn heads in a room full of powerpoint users.

As for Pages, I really liked 1.0, and 2.0 has pretty much cemented its position as my only word processor in use. I dont need much compatibility with Word (though it handles imports nicely) and I wont be writing any 100 page documents anytime soon. Mainly just the ability to export to PDF to print out at the campus IT suite. Theres something about it though...it just *feels* much nicer than Word and even Mellel. Applying styles is a breeze. Im definitely looking forward to exploring the spreadsheet feature too.

Except that the iLife apps come free with the purchase of a computer. Also they are fairly mature.

Pages V1 was slow and really needed a tweek before it was completely up to par with other Apple products.

In my opinion Apple should have provided that tweek for free and then upgraded the product again for iWork 06.

I guess if Apple is going to do micro-bumps of iWork similar to iLife then it would be wise to wait for iWork 07 when both Keynote & Pages are more mature and a possible new app might be added.

 

[bbyrdhouse]

Beware of iWork's horrendous exporting ability. The PDF's it exports always look busted in Acrobat, which 95% of the people you'll be showing the PDF will be using.

This may sound strange and I am not sure why there would be a difference but I have noticed a difference between using the "Export to PDF" and printing to PDF.

The printing to PDF is way faster and maintains the exact layout and colors and everything. The exporting to PDF takes longer and usually will have something that is a little different. (Mostly on larger files)

The same is true for Keynote.

 

[aegisdesign]

Except that the iLife apps come free with the purchase of a computer. Also they are fairly mature.

iWork should be provided too and IMHO iPhoto5 was far from mature and iTunes is now smelling a bit ripe and needs a rewrite. I bought the iLife '05 upgrade for iPhoto alone last year and it was completely unusable all the way through the year - slow, beachballing at the drop of a hat and corrupting colour info. At least v4 was just slow.

Pages V1 was slow and really needed a tweek before it was completely up to par with other Apple products.

So far, I think iLife06 and iWork06 are finally up to par in the older apps. iWeb is looking a bit ropey in it's output and Photocasting seems to be badly done so those will probably be this year's complaints that we complain about all year which never get fixed before the '07 products come out and they're miraculously fixed. Then we'll be bitching about Numbers v1.0 and even more useless .Mac integration.

In my opinion Apple should have provided that tweek for free and then upgraded the product again for iWork 06.

I guess if Apple is going to do micro-bumps of iWork similar to iLife then it would be wise to wait for iWork 07 when both Keynote & Pages are more mature and a possible new app might be added.

Nah, they're £55 for two of the best apps going on the Mac. That's a bargain. They also seem to have had substantially more QA on them this year as we're not already waiting for the vX.0.1 updates like we were at this point last year when iPhoto was corrupting imported libraries and you couldn't delete pages in Pages.

 

[-hh]

are you guys forgetting that microsoft will be developing office for the mac for AT LEAST the next five years?

I think the response to this is:

"Yeah, we've heard that, but what does that statement actually mean?"


For example, there's a huuuuge differences between:

a) MS is merely obligated to spend some money in "development", but not actually obligated to deliver any retail product(s) whatsoever.

b) MS has agreed to release a 'Universal' update to Office sometime before 12/31/2010.

(examples of typical worst case scenario's, etc.)

z) MS has agreed to always have a 'Universal' Mac version of Office with 100% feature parity that ships THE SAME DAY AS all PC versions, and will deliver the retail box of the first of these no later than 4/1/2006. Furthermore, MS agrees to ship within the next 15 days to do 15 other Mac-friendly miracles as freeware, which will obviously make people seriously suspect that Bill Gates has incurable cancer and is trying to make amends for saving his immortal soul.


-hh

 

[Bern]

Here's an "out there" idea.

Perhaps Apple have only gotten M$ to commit for the next five years only because they plan for iWork to be well and truly competitive to Office within five years???