Apple Pages First Look

pages; apple

MacWorld gives Apple's Pages the once-over:

"If Pages can’t do any of these things, then just who might want to use it? Just about everyone, I’m guessing, since it makes the creation of professional-looking documents a relatively trivial process."

The things it can't do are some of the more advanced features of Word, like mail merge, change-tracking, and macros. As the article says, hardly anyone really needs these features. Pages looks pretty much like the old Drawing module in AppleWorks, which was a fairly respectable desktop publishing tool if you knew how to use it - certainly better than all the budget DTP packages I've ever seen.

Advanced features are interesting things. They always follow the 80/20 rule (or even 90/10). Take Photoshop, for example: superb application. But Elements, at just a few quid, makes more sense for most people. The only bits you really miss are the high-end pre-press features, which, unless you're actually producing images for a printing press (as opposed to a home printer), you don't need. Same is true of advanced desktop publishing packages like XPress and InDesign. Unless you are seriously doing ths stuff for a living, you can do what you need to do in something like Pages.

For a home or small business user, it's often just a delusion makes them think they "need" a pro app. This is especially true of high-end music software. In the days when Logic came in 3 flavours, most people needed no more than the Gold version, unless they were using Logic as a front end to a high-end Pro Tools system. Still, the biggest seller was always Platinum. And when Pro Tools LE was artificially limited to 24 tracks (it's 32 now), people would complain about it, as if it was going to be utterly useless to them. Whereas most home hardware was barely capable, at the time, of doing 24-tracks simultaneously; and even if you could, if you weren't capable of coming up with something good with 24 tracks, you just weren't capable.

So I'm looking forward to Pages. I've never been fond of templates and stuff, but I'm hoping you can still start with a blank page and do your own thing. I suspect that my love for TextEdit won't wane though. TextEdit has almost all of what I need, 90% of the time.