I haven't seen Pages myself, and my machine is 50MHz shy of its minimum requirements, so I can only look around at others' impressions. They've been mixed, certainly. But it's a 1.0, and Apple is not trying to pass it off as a replacement for AppleWorks. Steve was quite explicit about that. Eventually, yes. Now, no.
First, I was the guy who forwarded the news that Pages didn't support word count. Mea maxima culpa.
Re: Text handling, I disagree with trumptman's notion of "consumer" text handling. The biggest thing the original Mac brought to people was typography, and Apple followed up with the LaserWriter to let people produce night-professional documents.
A Word file printed now looks for all the world like a Word file printed in 1986. This is simply negligent. If someone can make professional-looking typography happen more or less automagically on modern hardware, they should. That was the ethic of the original Mac, and I'm glad to see Apple return to it. Yes, text handling now is a lot more complicated than it was in 1984, but if you're going to offer fonts, why not use their full capabilities and render them as they were meant to be rendered? This is not about "consumers" vs. "pros," it's about whether the app restricts the quality of the output they could offer simply out of laziness.
As for scriptability: Apparently, Pages works with Automator, despite its lack of a scripting dictionary (and of course, it's scriptable via GUI scripting, ugly as that is). The person on applescript-users list who pointed that out also noted that while Keynote 1.0 was not scriptable either, Keynote 2.0 is, so if that's in fact the case then there's hope for Pages.
Given that Pages is a 1.0, and given that trumptman is far from the first person I've seen to spot holes in Pages' functionality (tech journalist Mike Wendland was not impressed either), I can only suggest hitting Apple's feedback pages and requesting features. It is only a 1.0.
Personally, even if I did have a slightly more capable machine, I wouldn't order it. I have no use for Keynote, and I do rely on AppleWorks' spreadsheet and frame-embedding capabilities. So for now, I'm sticking with the old warhorse.
Ive played with Pages a bit, and I actually quite like it.
The biggest issue I have with it is how it tries to bridge the gap between word processor and desktop publisher.
My gut feeling is that this is only a mirage created by the templates that Apple supplies with the system.
eg: You cant delete pages.
Nobody complains that you cant delete pages in Word, there are as many pages as there needs to be. It is the same in Pages, you delete the page, you delete the CONTENT.
The problem is that the interface invites you to think in terms of pages ( desktop publishing ) instead of content. You can create new pages from a convenient drop down in the toolbar. In reality when you do this you are creating CONTENT, not a page with a template. Once you create a page you cant change its template etc etc.
This mixed metaphor confuses me, and I think, many others. And it continues when you look at content editing. If you take a big lump of text and paste it into a region in a template it will just paste in a whole lot of untemplated pages. You cant apply templates to them afterwards, you need to create content and then piece it all together.
Im not sure how this will play out with users. Will people become accustomed to what is a totally new way to look at word processing? I really want to see the ability to apply templates to existing content.
The one gotcha I see to writing a script for Pages to do mail merge is that apparently Pages *doesn't have a scripting dictionary*. This just boggles my widdle head.
A Service is still possible though, and I'll check on whether it has an Automator suite as soon as I get my *()%^#@ copy.
I don't know much about Applescripts (other than using them) but this may be interesting to those of you that do.
It appears this person has created a mail merge script that proves it is possible. May not be usuable (I didn't test it).
Unless we are using a .doc document at work that is going through the track changes route, I have only been using Pages. I have even resorted to using Pages on .doc documents after the final changes have been made to clean up the formatting and styles snafus that occur during the process.
trumptman, this is the new OpenDoc. Services allow many applications to offer up, well, services, that can be used on data selected elsewhere. This lets third parties step in and fill in needs in other applications.
And in case it's lost in the product page:
Count statistics on a per selection basis.
Thanks for that link. Installed, one less issue.
I've noticed that find and replace won't let you find formating like a paragraph return and rplace it with a space. Any solutions out there?
Well here we are a week or so later and believe it or not I have still been plugging away at Pages. I've actually gotten more used to it now in terms of understanding what it can and cannot do. I know some may think it weird that I recreate certain templates in Appleworks, in part to show the power that Appleworks has at the consumer level, but when I do this, believe it or not it also teaches me how to use Pages.
Maybe it is akin to dissecting an animal, but when I have to recreate the pages in Appleworks, it actually gets me into the inspector and various Pages elements to understand how they were created within that application.
So this has lead me to some more good and bad with regard to Pages. Let me say first of all that it has moved from pure crap up to about the level of pretty darn decent. The inspector now makes sense when you get and understand one very basic aspect of Pages and that is that everything is still about text.
First another Appleworks to Pages template so you can see what I have been banging away on understanding, and also possibly get where I am coming from.
I don't know if many of you even have Appleworks to see the nice job I did there, but oh well either way. While I was going back and forth, recreating this in Appleworks, and also looking at how it was created in Pages, I finally started to get how Pages happens to work with regard to frames. It very much gave me a new appreciation of Pages and the power the objects within Pages have. However it also showed me the real limitations within Pages and that there is alot more than 5% more to get to what Appleworks could in some ways and also what the true successor to will need to do.
Pages is all about text, but really ONLY about text. The inspector makes sense when you (or more specifically I) understand this. When I ask Pages to drop a rectangle what it really is doing is creating a text frame/box that is in the shape of a rectangle that is predefined as having a one point border, no fill, rotation, etc. Amazingly a rectangle can even have multiple sections,variable columns and so forth again are all text attributes, but it makes sense when you think of a draw object as truly just a very capable text frame.
I kept wondering why, for example, the inspector wouldn't automatically pop on over to graphic attributes when dealing with say, a rectangle or square. It is because they truly aren't graphic objects in the strict sense. They are simply superpowerful text frames.
Now in regard to text, this is amazingly and incredibly powerful. It makes you realize that Pages, when thinking along a frames concept, has likely the most powerful text frame tools ever created. The big problem though is that the text frame tool is ALL it has at this point and as a result it behaves badly because of what is missing, what needs to be added and what management is necessary to guide and control all of this.
Kickaha's review called all these missing things the chromosomal damage and let me tell you, his vision of how Pages should work really helped me understand what is missing and how far this app really needs to go.
In his thread, he mentioned that like in Keynote, true content should be independent of the attributes on the pages and inserting and removing pages. I thought pretty hard about why this isn't so and concluded that it is because Pages really only has one tool, text. This is why it can't allow you to keep content seperate from attributes. It would need to have multiple attributes and a means of managing them. Instead it has text on the page and forms of text frames.
This means of course to get that last 5%, which is really more like 50% in my book, Pages will need to have a way of incorporating multiple types of inspectors, adding different types of frames, and lastly switching between those types of frames. When you have true graphical objects for example, you can tell the text content to not flow into it. Right now Pages can't do that because all content is a form of text be it document or text frame. There is no way to distinguish between text and nontext. There is no way to manage text content and non-text and text objects/frames. All this will have to be added.
Now the hard part is to see how they could add it and still have it still be seperate programs. It makes so much more sense to have it be within one program that manages different frame attributes. This is what Applework does so well. The frame attributes might be stuck in the 90's in some instances, but they are still well-managed, usable and most important, there.
Let me give you an example of where both Appleworks and Pages falls short, but where I could imagine the more refined successor making the next jump. Suppose the next version of Pages gained a true spreadsheet frame. You could drop the spreadsheet frame, have it display some cells, a graph, or both. The spreadsheet inspector would control what attributes the spreadsheet frame displayed and how they displayed them. You could have it where the spreadsheet inspector tells the frame to display cells, and when you are done editing them, automatically switch to the chart that is generated from those cells and their data without having to open a seperate app.
Right now in Appleworks, you can create the frame and create the chart, but you cannot have them be one object full of data that happens to display one, or multiple ways based off what you select in say, an inspector. In Pages, you can generate the chart and it is a sort of brain damaged add-on in the text inspector. It opens an entirely new, weird subwindows that is neither dialog, nor true window, nor part of a frame object. You cannot do any true spreadsheet attributes in the weird subwindow.
So Pages does have some promise. However to realize it, they need to hopefully understand that Pages current power comes from people using the attributes in it like frames and objects. We need a way to manage these objects and also the addition of several equally as powerful new objects that deal with graphics, spreadsheets, mail-merge for example. Each of these new objects likely cannot fit in the current inspector. Instead they need their own. Perhaps a superinspector that would contextually change depending upon which object we selected. In Appleworks the tool bars would actually change according to what object was selected. The inspector is more powerful, but only manages one true tool, text.
One of the most confusing parts of Pages right now is how the program doesn't give good feedback between if you are attempting to select the document text or one of the superpowerful text objects on top of the document. This would probably be better thought out if it had to manage more than one type of frame/object. I don't know if Apple is going to add that to Pages or create an entirely new program for those types of objects. If Apple doesn't add new object/frames, then this management problem will still likely manifest itself even in the next version.
I thought about why people don't notice this issue as much in Keynote. One it is because the information is less dense in Keynote. I couldn't imagine a Keynote slide with say, columns of text. with a textbox somewhere near it. Also the document vs. object function are handled via the slide controls. That is why everyone has noticed the lack of page controls for Pages. It really has more to do with being unable to cleanly control what you are selecting with regard to document and objects. The objects are very clear, and well seperated in Keynote. The density of info likely to be presented makes the problem that exists in both programs much clearer in Pages.
I think perhaps part of my lack of mental mismatch with their model (in some ways) is due to knowing more about the programming system being used. You were surprised by the text fields in graphics being that powerful, but to me it is to be assumed - *any* NSTextField can get that much power pretty much for free, so why not in the label of a graphic?
I'll have to mull over the 'everything as text box' viewpoint to see how it plays out in my head, but it's an interesting way of looking at it. Sometimes, after using an application development system for a while, and knowing the ins and outs, you need that 'external' review of what seems normal and what is surprising to give yourself a reality check. Thanks for the idea.
The 'spreadsheet' tool is really only used for charting, AFAICT, and even then, it's assumed it will be used for the simple end-result graphics that are most common in presentations (which makes sense, since the tool came from Keynote), or maybe for quick school reports K-12. It's really rudimentary, and really more like a strange table input mechanism. (Actually, that'd be a cool trick - be able to tie a table and chart together in the document. Yes, I know other apps can do this, obviously, but those are full fledged spreadsheets. I don't know if it's possible to tie a word processor *table* and a chart together. Anyone? Bueller?) I would like to see it augmented by a real spreadsheet app (best of all worlds would be a database system with a spreadsheet-view front end...), but in the meantime I think the same principle applies as with the graphics tool: fine for very basic things, but if you need more power, select the app that fits your needs best, and Pages/Keynote will readily accept its output, tuned to what you need. I know that my charting needs aren't going to be handled well by it, so I will continue to use other apps for the actual chart creation. Ah well, maybe some day.
I would like to see it augmented by a real spreadsheet app (best of all worlds would be a database system with a spreadsheet-view front end...)
Wasn't Tiger rumored to have some kind of database built-in? I just figured that Apple is waiting on Tiger to debut the spreadsheet and drive adoption of both the OS and the app. But I doubt Apple would rev the packaging of iWork before MWSF '06, so it seems like we will have quite a wait.
In the meantime, I guess Mariner Calc will have to do.
BTW, someone asked me today and I had no answer: Is there any word about the next version of Office? IIRC, it's usually revved early in the year. I can't see Office 2005 being released in the middle of the year - but I have seen anything on the rumor sites.
Wasn't Tiger rumored to have some kind of database built-in? I just figured that Apple is waiting on Tiger to debut the spreadsheet and drive adoption of both the OS and the app. But I doubt Apple would rev the packaging of iWork before MWSF '06, so it seems like we will have quite a wait.
Yup, Tiger will have a database engine built-in. Embarrassingly, I can't recall offhand if it's going to be MySQL or SQLLite. One of the two. So yes, the rumored Cells could indeed be done on top of that DB and it would make things quite interesting. I'm not sure that they're going to want to push it into the consumer DB realm, what with FileMaker being a fairly successful side venture they have going... then again, maybe that will be a nice differentiation.
I suspect Cells or a consumer DB won't show up until iWork06, just to give time for Tiger to propagate, and then during the upgrade slump, give people an additional reason to do. Also, it will give them a few months of real world testing by users to get the bugs out of the underlying DB mechanisms.
I'd love for Apple to include a DB and Spreadsheet along the lines of Improv or Quantrix. I can wait another year if they hit the ground running. Using MS products is just maddening.
Is this something the iApps and Address Book/iCal/Mail will use instead of whatever they're using now?
Is it open to third parties? DayLite and Chronos Sticky Brain both require installation of a database called Openbase. Will developers like these just use the built-in SQLite from now on?
If this is the case, it would explain the rumors about Filemaker.
Spotlight uses the database to store the metadata information. I believe Coredata will be the unified OS structure for Apple and 3rd party. Makes sense as Coredata is obviates the need for running another db like Openbase and gives you the ability to "jack into" other apps utilizing Coredata/SQLite.
Consumers don't understand this gobledygook yet but It portends a very nice jump in interapplication usability. Apple is making sure they hit the ground running with Tiger and I think our beloved platform will be further strengthened because of Apple's efforts.
Every application has what's called a "model" (even if they don't separate it out specifically), which basically contains all the data the application needs. This includes both stuff you enter and metadata like window positions, recent documents, and other information that the application needs to keep track of.
As it stands, every application has needed to revisit the problem of designing and implementing a model. OS X has provided an ever-growing number of tools to simplify and standardize this process, and you can think of Core Data as the logical conclusion. The goal of a database is to store and retrieve data in an organized and logical way. The goal of a model is to store and retrieve data in an organized and logical way.
So, in a sense, what Apple is doing is implementing the model part of your application so that you don't have to. (You still have to design the model, i.e., figure out which data are related to what, and how, but there's no real way around that.) This has interesting ramifications:
First, obviously, it's that much less work to build an application.
Second, since there are standard interface widgets, and since there is now a standard model, it's now much, much easier to associate your model with your user interface.
Third, since there's a standard model between those applications that use Core Data, they have standard formats and standard protocols for sharing each other's data. This includes common file formats.
Quote:
Is it open to third parties?
Oh yes, the whole point is that this is now part of the system, integrated into the developer tools and available to all OS X developers.
It really doesn't involve FileMaker, so far as I know. FileMaker is an implementation of the same idea—applications built on top of databases—except the applications are more specialized and cross-platform, and the database is more robust and powerful. I don't believe that FM's fate is intertwined with Core Data at all.
What Core Data can do for iWork is another matter entirely.
I personally like Pages and the way it works and looks. One thing I'm curious about is whether or not third-party developers will be able to make new templates for us to use much like has happened with Keynote. It's easy to find different themes, and there really are some amazing ones out there. Will the same likely occur with Pages?
This was already mentioned by me above. However it will not count the words within a selected portion of text. My professor would be quite upset if I turned in a 5000 word essay and had counted my name, class section, etc as "words" within that essay.
Are you really serious? I know this isn't very germane to the discussion, but I've never heard of a professor being that strict with word counts. Do your essays have to clock in at exactly the right number of words? Does your professor have OCD?
To make this post slightly more on topic, I'll agree with you... the lack of a built-in word count action is a pretty glaring oversight. Do you think Apple will release free, incremental updates like they do with iTunes?
the lack of a built-in word count action is a pretty glaring oversight.
I believe what you meant to say is a 'lack of a built-in per-selection word count action...' There's a global word count, but not a per-selection one, although a number of alternate solutions have been posted here and elsewhere. A couple of them even allow you to do per-selection word count *anywhere* in the system, in *any* application, for free. Can't beat that with a stick.
I personally like Pages and the way it works and looks. One thing I'm curious about is whether or not third-party developers will be able to make new templates for us to use much like has happened with Keynote. It's easy to find different themes, and there really are some amazing ones out there. Will the same likely occur with Pages?
Yes, and no.
Yes in that it is *much* easier to make new templates in Pages than it is in Keynote.
No, in that is *so* much easier that most end users will be able to tweak the included basic templates to pretty much precisely what they want, so the market for commercial templates for sale is likely to be about nil.
Yesterday another site brought Unsanity's Silk to my attention.
I've always avoided haxies on my system, but I figured I wasn't going to wait a year for a Cocoa spreadsheet or fork out $400. for MS Office.
So what did I have to lose?
Appleworks feels like a brand new program. No more jagged text on everything I write. The system doesn't feel like it's any less stable.
If a third party can do this so well and so cheaply, why did Apple make us wait for the last five years?
Well done Unsanity. Now I can wait awhile for iWork to mature before jumping in...
I agree Silk gets rid of the terrible carbon font display within Appleworks. It is so sad because it really makes you realize how little Apple needed to do to get Appleworks to a a nice version seven.
For one thing, Silk doesn't change the typography. It doesn't enable any rendering, kerning, or font-based changes. It's just smoke and mirrors, and really, it's a cheap hack. It sticks anti-aliasing at the end of the QuickDraw render chain, and that's all. It can't alter the kerning to take best advantage of the anti-aliasing for the output device, for example. A Quartz/ATSUI text system can.
If Apple had done this, and tried foisting it off as a 7.0, you'd be bitching to high heaven.
Comments
First, I was the guy who forwarded the news that Pages didn't support word count. Mea maxima culpa.
Re: Text handling, I disagree with trumptman's notion of "consumer" text handling. The biggest thing the original Mac brought to people was typography, and Apple followed up with the LaserWriter to let people produce night-professional documents.
A Word file printed now looks for all the world like a Word file printed in 1986. This is simply negligent. If someone can make professional-looking typography happen more or less automagically on modern hardware, they should. That was the ethic of the original Mac, and I'm glad to see Apple return to it. Yes, text handling now is a lot more complicated than it was in 1984, but if you're going to offer fonts, why not use their full capabilities and render them as they were meant to be rendered? This is not about "consumers" vs. "pros," it's about whether the app restricts the quality of the output they could offer simply out of laziness.
As for scriptability: Apparently, Pages works with Automator, despite its lack of a scripting dictionary (and of course, it's scriptable via GUI scripting, ugly as that is). The person on applescript-users list who pointed that out also noted that while Keynote 1.0 was not scriptable either, Keynote 2.0 is, so if that's in fact the case then there's hope for Pages.
Given that Pages is a 1.0, and given that trumptman is far from the first person I've seen to spot holes in Pages' functionality (tech journalist Mike Wendland was not impressed either), I can only suggest hitting Apple's feedback pages and requesting features. It is only a 1.0.
Personally, even if I did have a slightly more capable machine, I wouldn't order it. I have no use for Keynote, and I do rely on AppleWorks' spreadsheet and frame-embedding capabilities. So for now, I'm sticking with the old warhorse.
The biggest issue I have with it is how it tries to bridge the gap between word processor and desktop publisher.
My gut feeling is that this is only a mirage created by the templates that Apple supplies with the system.
eg: You cant delete pages.
Nobody complains that you cant delete pages in Word, there are as many pages as there needs to be. It is the same in Pages, you delete the page, you delete the CONTENT.
The problem is that the interface invites you to think in terms of pages ( desktop publishing ) instead of content. You can create new pages from a convenient drop down in the toolbar. In reality when you do this you are creating CONTENT, not a page with a template. Once you create a page you cant change its template etc etc.
This mixed metaphor confuses me, and I think, many others. And it continues when you look at content editing. If you take a big lump of text and paste it into a region in a template it will just paste in a whole lot of untemplated pages. You cant apply templates to them afterwards, you need to create content and then piece it all together.
Im not sure how this will play out with users. Will people become accustomed to what is a totally new way to look at word processing? I really want to see the ability to apply templates to existing content.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Yup. It's due with 10.4 later this year.
The one gotcha I see to writing a script for Pages to do mail merge is that apparently Pages *doesn't have a scripting dictionary*. This just boggles my widdle head.
A Service is still possible though, and I'll check on whether it has an Automator suite as soon as I get my *()%^#@ copy.
I don't know much about Applescripts (other than using them) but this may be interesting to those of you that do.
It appears this person has created a mail merge script that proves it is possible. May not be usuable (I didn't test it).
Unless we are using a .doc document at work that is going through the track changes route, I have only been using Pages. I have even resorted to using Pages on .doc documents after the final changes have been made to clean up the formatting and styles snafus that occur during the process.
Originally posted by Kickaha
What did I say about Services?
http://www.grunenberg.com/wordservice.html
trumptman, this is the new OpenDoc.
And in case it's lost in the product page:
Count statistics on a per selection basis.
Thanks for that link. Installed, one less issue.
I've noticed that find and replace won't let you find formating like a paragraph return and rplace it with a space. Any solutions out there?
Maybe it is akin to dissecting an animal, but when I have to recreate the pages in Appleworks, it actually gets me into the inspector and various Pages elements to understand how they were created within that application.
So this has lead me to some more good and bad with regard to Pages. Let me say first of all that it has moved from pure crap up to about the level of pretty darn decent. The inspector now makes sense when you get and understand one very basic aspect of Pages and that is that everything is still about text.
First another Appleworks to Pages template so you can see what I have been banging away on understanding, and also possibly get where I am coming from.
brochure
I don't know if many of you even have Appleworks to see the nice job I did there, but oh well either way. While I was going back and forth, recreating this in Appleworks, and also looking at how it was created in Pages, I finally started to get how Pages happens to work with regard to frames. It very much gave me a new appreciation of Pages and the power the objects within Pages have. However it also showed me the real limitations within Pages and that there is alot more than 5% more to get to what Appleworks could in some ways and also what the true successor to will need to do.
Pages is all about text, but really ONLY about text. The inspector makes sense when you (or more specifically I) understand this. When I ask Pages to drop a rectangle what it really is doing is creating a text frame/box that is in the shape of a rectangle that is predefined as having a one point border, no fill, rotation, etc. Amazingly a rectangle can even have multiple sections,variable columns and so forth again are all text attributes, but it makes sense when you think of a draw object as truly just a very capable text frame.
I kept wondering why, for example, the inspector wouldn't automatically pop on over to graphic attributes when dealing with say, a rectangle or square. It is because they truly aren't graphic objects in the strict sense. They are simply superpowerful text frames.
Now in regard to text, this is amazingly and incredibly powerful. It makes you realize that Pages, when thinking along a frames concept, has likely the most powerful text frame tools ever created. The big problem though is that the text frame tool is ALL it has at this point and as a result it behaves badly because of what is missing, what needs to be added and what management is necessary to guide and control all of this.
Kickaha's review called all these missing things the chromosomal damage and let me tell you, his vision of how Pages should work really helped me understand what is missing and how far this app really needs to go.
In his thread, he mentioned that like in Keynote, true content should be independent of the attributes on the pages and inserting and removing pages. I thought pretty hard about why this isn't so and concluded that it is because Pages really only has one tool, text. This is why it can't allow you to keep content seperate from attributes. It would need to have multiple attributes and a means of managing them. Instead it has text on the page and forms of text frames.
This means of course to get that last 5%, which is really more like 50% in my book, Pages will need to have a way of incorporating multiple types of inspectors, adding different types of frames, and lastly switching between those types of frames. When you have true graphical objects for example, you can tell the text content to not flow into it. Right now Pages can't do that because all content is a form of text be it document or text frame. There is no way to distinguish between text and nontext. There is no way to manage text content and non-text and text objects/frames. All this will have to be added.
Now the hard part is to see how they could add it and still have it still be seperate programs. It makes so much more sense to have it be within one program that manages different frame attributes. This is what Applework does so well. The frame attributes might be stuck in the 90's in some instances, but they are still well-managed, usable and most important, there.
Let me give you an example of where both Appleworks and Pages falls short, but where I could imagine the more refined successor making the next jump. Suppose the next version of Pages gained a true spreadsheet frame. You could drop the spreadsheet frame, have it display some cells, a graph, or both. The spreadsheet inspector would control what attributes the spreadsheet frame displayed and how they displayed them. You could have it where the spreadsheet inspector tells the frame to display cells, and when you are done editing them, automatically switch to the chart that is generated from those cells and their data without having to open a seperate app.
Right now in Appleworks, you can create the frame and create the chart, but you cannot have them be one object full of data that happens to display one, or multiple ways based off what you select in say, an inspector. In Pages, you can generate the chart and it is a sort of brain damaged add-on in the text inspector. It opens an entirely new, weird subwindows that is neither dialog, nor true window, nor part of a frame object. You cannot do any true spreadsheet attributes in the weird subwindow.
So Pages does have some promise. However to realize it, they need to hopefully understand that Pages current power comes from people using the attributes in it like frames and objects. We need a way to manage these objects and also the addition of several equally as powerful new objects that deal with graphics, spreadsheets, mail-merge for example. Each of these new objects likely cannot fit in the current inspector. Instead they need their own. Perhaps a superinspector that would contextually change depending upon which object we selected. In Appleworks the tool bars would actually change according to what object was selected. The inspector is more powerful, but only manages one true tool, text.
One of the most confusing parts of Pages right now is how the program doesn't give good feedback between if you are attempting to select the document text or one of the superpowerful text objects on top of the document. This would probably be better thought out if it had to manage more than one type of frame/object. I don't know if Apple is going to add that to Pages or create an entirely new program for those types of objects. If Apple doesn't add new object/frames, then this management problem will still likely manifest itself even in the next version.
I thought about why people don't notice this issue as much in Keynote. One it is because the information is less dense in Keynote. I couldn't imagine a Keynote slide with say, columns of text. with a textbox somewhere near it. Also the document vs. object function are handled via the slide controls. That is why everyone has noticed the lack of page controls for Pages. It really has more to do with being unable to cleanly control what you are selecting with regard to document and objects. The objects are very clear, and well seperated in Keynote. The density of info likely to be presented makes the problem that exists in both programs much clearer in Pages.
More likely to come,
Nick
I think perhaps part of my lack of mental mismatch with their model (in some ways) is due to knowing more about the programming system being used. You were surprised by the text fields in graphics being that powerful, but to me it is to be assumed - *any* NSTextField can get that much power pretty much for free, so why not in the label of a graphic?
I'll have to mull over the 'everything as text box' viewpoint to see how it plays out in my head, but it's an interesting way of looking at it. Sometimes, after using an application development system for a while, and knowing the ins and outs, you need that 'external' review of what seems normal and what is surprising to give yourself a reality check. Thanks for the idea.
The 'spreadsheet' tool is really only used for charting, AFAICT, and even then, it's assumed it will be used for the simple end-result graphics that are most common in presentations (which makes sense, since the tool came from Keynote), or maybe for quick school reports K-12. It's really rudimentary, and really more like a strange table input mechanism. (Actually, that'd be a cool trick - be able to tie a table and chart together in the document. Yes, I know other apps can do this, obviously, but those are full fledged spreadsheets. I don't know if it's possible to tie a word processor *table* and a chart together. Anyone? Bueller?) I would like to see it augmented by a real spreadsheet app (best of all worlds would be a database system with a spreadsheet-view front end...), but in the meantime I think the same principle applies as with the graphics tool: fine for very basic things, but if you need more power, select the app that fits your needs best, and Pages/Keynote will readily accept its output, tuned to what you need. I know that my charting needs aren't going to be handled well by it, so I will continue to use other apps for the actual chart creation. Ah well, maybe some day.
Originally posted by Kickaha
I would like to see it augmented by a real spreadsheet app (best of all worlds would be a database system with a spreadsheet-view front end...)
Wasn't Tiger rumored to have some kind of database built-in? I just figured that Apple is waiting on Tiger to debut the spreadsheet and drive adoption of both the OS and the app. But I doubt Apple would rev the packaging of iWork before MWSF '06, so it seems like we will have quite a wait.
In the meantime, I guess Mariner Calc will have to do.
BTW, someone asked me today and I had no answer: Is there any word about the next version of Office? IIRC, it's usually revved early in the year. I can't see Office 2005 being released in the middle of the year - but I have seen anything on the rumor sites.
Originally posted by Frank777
Wasn't Tiger rumored to have some kind of database built-in? I just figured that Apple is waiting on Tiger to debut the spreadsheet and drive adoption of both the OS and the app. But I doubt Apple would rev the packaging of iWork before MWSF '06, so it seems like we will have quite a wait.
Yup, Tiger will have a database engine built-in. Embarrassingly, I can't recall offhand if it's going to be MySQL or SQLLite. One of the two. So yes, the rumored Cells could indeed be done on top of that DB and it would make things quite interesting. I'm not sure that they're going to want to push it into the consumer DB realm, what with FileMaker being a fairly successful side venture they have going... then again, maybe that will be a nice differentiation.
I suspect Cells or a consumer DB won't show up until iWork06, just to give time for Tiger to propagate, and then during the upgrade slump, give people an additional reason to do. Also, it will give them a few months of real world testing by users to get the bugs out of the underlying DB mechanisms.
I'd love for Apple to include a DB and Spreadsheet along the lines of Improv or Quantrix. I can wait another year if they hit the ground running. Using MS products is just maddening.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Yup, Tiger will have a database engine built-in.
So what's the built-in database for?
Is this something the iApps and Address Book/iCal/Mail will use instead of whatever they're using now?
Is it open to third parties? DayLite and Chronos Sticky Brain both require installation of a database called Openbase. Will developers like these just use the built-in SQLite from now on?
If this is the case, it would explain the rumors about Filemaker.
Consumers don't understand this gobledygook yet but It portends a very nice jump in interapplication usability. Apple is making sure they hit the ground running with Tiger and I think our beloved platform will be further strengthened because of Apple's efforts.
Originally posted by Frank777
So what's the built-in database for?
Every application has what's called a "model" (even if they don't separate it out specifically), which basically contains all the data the application needs. This includes both stuff you enter and metadata like window positions, recent documents, and other information that the application needs to keep track of.
As it stands, every application has needed to revisit the problem of designing and implementing a model. OS X has provided an ever-growing number of tools to simplify and standardize this process, and you can think of Core Data as the logical conclusion. The goal of a database is to store and retrieve data in an organized and logical way. The goal of a model is to store and retrieve data in an organized and logical way.
So, in a sense, what Apple is doing is implementing the model part of your application so that you don't have to. (You still have to design the model, i.e., figure out which data are related to what, and how, but there's no real way around that.) This has interesting ramifications:
First, obviously, it's that much less work to build an application.
Second, since there are standard interface widgets, and since there is now a standard model, it's now much, much easier to associate your model with your user interface.
Third, since there's a standard model between those applications that use Core Data, they have standard formats and standard protocols for sharing each other's data. This includes common file formats.
Is it open to third parties?
Oh yes, the whole point is that this is now part of the system, integrated into the developer tools and available to all OS X developers.
It really doesn't involve FileMaker, so far as I know. FileMaker is an implementation of the same idea—applications built on top of databases—except the applications are more specialized and cross-platform, and the database is more robust and powerful. I don't believe that FM's fate is intertwined with Core Data at all.
What Core Data can do for iWork is another matter entirely.
I certainly hope so. The more, the merrier I say.
Originally posted by trumptman
This was already mentioned by me above. However it will not count the words within a selected portion of text. My professor would be quite upset if I turned in a 5000 word essay and had counted my name, class section, etc as "words" within that essay.
Are you really serious? I know this isn't very germane to the discussion, but I've never heard of a professor being that strict with word counts. Do your essays have to clock in at exactly the right number of words? Does your professor have OCD?
To make this post slightly more on topic, I'll agree with you... the lack of a built-in word count action is a pretty glaring oversight. Do you think Apple will release free, incremental updates like they do with iTunes?
Originally posted by elron
the lack of a built-in word count action is a pretty glaring oversight.
I believe what you meant to say is a 'lack of a built-in per-selection word count action...' There's a global word count, but not a per-selection one, although a number of alternate solutions have been posted here and elsewhere. A couple of them even allow you to do per-selection word count *anywhere* in the system, in *any* application, for free. Can't beat that with a stick.
Originally posted by Brian Green
I personally like Pages and the way it works and looks. One thing I'm curious about is whether or not third-party developers will be able to make new templates for us to use much like has happened with Keynote. It's easy to find different themes, and there really are some amazing ones out there. Will the same likely occur with Pages?
Yes, and no.
Yes in that it is *much* easier to make new templates in Pages than it is in Keynote.
No, in that is *so* much easier that most end users will be able to tweak the included basic templates to pretty much precisely what they want, so the market for commercial templates for sale is likely to be about nil.
We'll see how the two balance out.
I've always avoided haxies on my system, but I figured I wasn't going to wait a year for a Cocoa spreadsheet or fork out $400. for MS Office.
So what did I have to lose?
Appleworks feels like a brand new program. No more jagged text on everything I write. The system doesn't feel like it's any less stable.
If a third party can do this so well and so cheaply, why did Apple make us wait for the last five years?
Well done Unsanity. Now I can wait awhile for iWork to mature before jumping in...
Originally posted by Frank777
Yesterday another site brought Unsanity's Silk to my attention.
I've always avoided haxies on my system, but I figured I wasn't going to wait a year for a Cocoa spreadsheet or fork out $400. for MS Office.
So what did I have to lose?
Appleworks feels like a brand new program. No more jagged text on everything I write. The system doesn't feel like it's any less stable.
If a third party can do this so well and so cheaply, why did Apple make us wait for the last five years?
Well done Unsanity. Now I can wait awhile for iWork to mature before jumping in...
I agree Silk gets rid of the terrible carbon font display within Appleworks. It is so sad because it really makes you realize how little Apple needed to do to get Appleworks to a a nice version seven.
Nick
For one thing, Silk doesn't change the typography. It doesn't enable any rendering, kerning, or font-based changes. It's just smoke and mirrors, and really, it's a cheap hack. It sticks anti-aliasing at the end of the QuickDraw render chain, and that's all. It can't alter the kerning to take best advantage of the anti-aliasing for the output device, for example. A Quartz/ATSUI text system can.
If Apple had done this, and tried foisting it off as a 7.0, you'd be bitching to high heaven.