I actually bought iWorks when it came out. I don't use it. I even regret buying it. I'm a student and no matter how I like it my school expects assignments in Microsoft Word format. I usually e-mail them in.
You know that Microsoft Office format is .doc right? You know you can save your Pages documents as .doc right?
Research. Before. You. Say. It. Doesn't. Do. What. I. Need. It. To. Do.
Exactly... look what happened to Internet Explorer on the Mac once Apple came out with Safari. Microsoft announced tha all future development of Mac IE would cease. Clearly shows that Microsoft is willing to abandon Mac development if Apple gets directly in their way.
MS annonced that they ceased development on IE on both Mac and Windows.
IE was/is supposed to be tightly integrated with Longhorn, and only recently have they decided to make an update for WinXP SP2.
Furthermore, MS didn't make any major updates to IE5 for Mac since it was released in 2001.
It's more likely that Apple decided to make a browser because of MS' non existant development of IE than MS dropped IE because of Safari.
So was there any spreadsheety or word processor type applications back in the day that are seemingly familiar when it comes to Pages or what will become the new Numbers?
Apple needs to get a fully featured (yet simple) office suite up and running, and it needs to be bundled with every mac at no extra cost. Yes, IT MUST BE FREE!!! Just like iLife, iWork needs to get to a point where it can be the centre of your digital (work) life, and it needs to come with every mac sold. Charging for updates is fine, but far more people buy a computer looking to do the things that Office suites do, rather than what iLife does. Having to shell out for a basic office package after buying a computer that costs as much as any mac does, including the mini, is simply cheap.
Pages is somewhat funky/ phunky. It's cool, but it requires a bit of rethinking to get the hang of it. particularly because text boxes are mostly columnised and not just fully draggable and repositionable around the page, AFAIK, only images and other media. I'm still figuring it out after a few weeks, me being a illustrator/photoshop/pagemaker/ms word user for several years now, it's a bit weird, i have to admit, but promising.
Keynote 2 though f8cking kicks ass. I love it, quicktime, safari web snapshots, and all that.
Pages 2.0
Keynote 3.0
Numbers 2.0
Mail.app 3.0
this would be closer to the microsoft office killer we are hungering for
getting close peoples
mwsf2006, mwsf2007 on intels, iWork and iLife bundled with all Macs, yes, very promising
If Apple makes a spreadsheet, it better be like the Quantrix Modeler. That thing looks sweet. I think NeXT used to make something like back in the 90s.
If Apple makes a spreadsheet, it better be like the Quantrix Modeler. That thing looks sweet. I think NeXT used to make something like back in the 90s.
umm, i hate to be an ass, but no.
a majority of apple's target market for growing the brand and profits would not even know wtf
"Quantitative Modeling Software for Professionals"
is,
let alone how to spell those words.
who was it that said "you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the *ahem* american (replace with global) public"
edit:
case in point: front page of website says:
"Quantrix was the best solution for Cimpor."
Eugenio Pauperio, CIO, Cimpor
1. who the hell is eugenio?
2. why should i care about Cimpor?
3. Cimpor is one of those sucky-ass uncool boring grey-building corporate names.
3. outside of the corporate world, "best solution" is meaningless jargon
the way iWork is currently built and apple, Numbers should probably be marketed as:
Phunky-sexy-looking 30something Jane:
"i finally managed to balance my checkbook, and could afford a whole new wardrobe..!"
not meant to be sexist:
Intelligent-but-suave-looking 30something Joe:
"with iWork '06, i can just focus on my family, my business, getting on with my life"
but what do i know? besides my restraining order banning me from 1km of any Apple marketing dept employee**
**no such restraining order is in place, joke used only for effect and to tickle the ribs of appleinsider visitors. apple marketing department is cool. um, and i am not a psycho stalker..... yet.....
It was at about this time that Steve Jobs visited and gave them one of the new NeXT computers. The NeXT made Improv possible due to its powerful NeXTSTEP programming environment. Jobs clearly "got it", and became one of the product's biggest supporters and critics, and many of the ideas that appeared in the final product were at his urging.
Improv was so popular that it became one of the few killer apps on the NeXT platform, and machines started showing up in financial officies in the thousands.
Steve has definitely been a fan of Lotus Improv which is improved in the Quantrix Modeler. I don't see him changing and moving to todays Excel clones. The natural language of Quantrix coupled with the ability to reorder data and use far fewer equations is huge to me. I think the only reason why Apple hasn't gone this route is because of the competition they wish to avoid with MS Office.
While Quantrix makes the product sound difficult or somehow aimed at just financial modelers I don't see why it wouldn't work for far more tasks.
I'd like to see Apple have something like Quantrix fused with nice graphic capability. We'll see if "Numbers" sees the light of day and what features it offers. I'm curious.
did next have a word processing app? why yes, they did. do a google search for steve jobs' promo video for nextstep 3 (i think), where he shows off a cool new word processing/layout app. care to guess what it was called?
Sunil I think you're wrong on this one and bborofka is correct and here's why.
.........
.........
While Quantrix makes the product sound difficult or somehow aimed at just financial modelers I don't see why it wouldn't work for far more tasks.
I'd like to see Apple have something like Quantrix fused with nice graphic capability. We'll see if "Numbers" sees the light of day and what features it offers. I'm curious.
fair enough mate. i think i was in a bit of a twisted moood because my 50+ year old aunt and uncle were over for supper last night and were like "oh, i heard apple and microsoft are going to merge and apple will be no more in two years" WTF?
For all those that say Pages is interesting but doesn't have the features they use in Word, may I ask what exactly those features are? Many people have said this but the only feature mentioned is Mail merge. Is it just this? I can understand Mail merge is very important to those who use it, but surely there can't be tht many people using it? I think the trouble here is just that a lot of people haven't taken 10 minutes to explorer Pages (IMO very good) interface.
Also there's all this talk of Pages being a hybrid Word-processor/DTP program. Again, I don't buy this. When Apple describes it as a "Word processor with an incredible sense of style" they are not actually far off. All the layouts are created with just columns, text boxes, section breaks, images and text styles, all of which are standard Word processing features. All Pages does is have excellant support for these features (unlike some other word processors...) and ~40 professionally designed templates to show off what you can do with them. Just select any template and go View -> Layout to see.
Pages is in many ways more powerful than Word. I can't wait to see v2.
I think Pages manages to straddle the middle ground between Quark/Indesign and Word sucessfully, Apple has to be careful not to step on Adobe or Microsoft's toe. beside a consumer page layout app is seriously missing, it's suppose to be an iApps afterall, if there's going to be Numbers, it would probably be a consumer level,
the only thing that doesn't fit the whole iApp regime is Keynote, it's waay too high-end, but that doesn't preclude it from being usable.
Unless there's a real breakthrough of functionality/performance like FinalCut Pro, Apple probably won't market a pro level office suite.
But I would consider that if this new spreadsheet program is based on Improv or Quantrix, that it would be pro enough, but then there's the problem of marketing two lines of pro and consumer level apps, not that it can't be done, but it's hard enough just to market a consumer level office suite like AppleWorks
I bought pages earlier this year and have used it to do some actual work. I had to read the manual to understand some aspects of it. I'm in college and i used it for eco, world lit, and cell bio.
Here are some cons:
--when i applied styles to stuff that was centered my text moved to the left. I am assuming that a style also includes the justification. I don't like that though. So i guess pages needs more fine grande control in that area.
--If pages wants to do bullets different than any other way i have ever seen it in an app (textedit or word). It should some how point that to users.
--I wish it wasn't so print oriented. I would like to be able to make a web page with it. In this day and age the internet is the most important medium.
--I know that you can option click the inspector icon to get multiple inspectors but i think that is a mistake. I think you should just click the inspector icon for a new inspector and click to close button on an inspector to get rid of them.
--the auto numbering when doing a list is hard to control if you don't go in order.
--I would like to be able to control the insertion and deletion of pages more easily. Maybe a column to the side like keynote.
--My biggest problem with pages is that the chart/graphing utility is far to weak. I don't care if its a consumer app there really is no excuse for the suckyness of the graphing capabilities in pages. Tables could be better but aren't terrible.
--If pages wants to do bullets different than any other way i have ever seen it in an app (textedit or word). It should some how point that to users.
Hmm, it doesn't start them automatically (a blessing or a pain depending on your point of view), but its hardly difficult, is it? Click the 'list' button at the top and select bullets to start bullets. When you've finished, click it again and select none.
Quote:
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--I would like to be able to control the insertion and deletion of pages more easily. Maybe a column to the side like keynote.
This was added with the 1.0.2 update - View -> Show Page Thumbnails
Quote:
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--My biggest problem with pages is that the chart/graphing utility is far to weak. I don't care if its a consumer app there really is no excuse for the suckyness of the graphing capabilities in pages. Tables could be better but aren't terrible.
neilj: thank you sooooooo much for that thumbnail view tip. I saw the delete page but not the thumbnail view. Its very useful. So i guess I take that con back.
--for bullets. What i mean by its not a standard format is that usually like, in textedit, if you want to make a sub series under a bullet you just press tab. pages you have to press cmd+ "]" or ""[". I've never had to do that before.
--For Graphs. The graphs I make are usually for science classes. So say i want to plot. distance vs. time. And i want the x-axis to be time and the y-axis to be distance. There is no easy way to label the graphs. There is no easy way to set the x-axis as time. I guess you could just add in your own text boxes to label. And if you enter in your own label then the labels don't move with the graph.
When entering the x & y coordinates why do i have to have the same x for a set of 2 ys. I would like to have a uniform x-axis number set, say every 15 seconds. and have a separate set for x & y coordinates. that way if i need to change from every 15 seconds to every 2 seconds I can with out having to change the entire graph to every 2 seconds. This is important because sometimes things are steady but then change exponentially. and using only even numbering through out data.
You can't do exponential graphs.
Also there is not scatter plot with best fit. That just knocks out 90% of the graphs i ever need to do.
I need to do std. deviations. There is no tool to do that.
I need to take some weird R squared deal that I forgot what it means.
and basically pages doesn't make it easy to graph for anything scientific at all.
--For Graphs. The graphs I make are usually for science classes. So say i want to plot. distance vs. time. And i want the x-axis to be time and the y-axis to be distance. There is no easy way to label the graphs. There is no easy way to set the x-axis as time. I guess you could just add in your own text boxes to label. And if you enter in your own label then the labels don't move with the graph.
When entering the x & y coordinates why do i have to have the same x for a set of 2 ys. I would like to have a uniform x-axis number set, say every 15 seconds. and have a separate set for x & y coordinates. that way if i need to change from every 15 seconds to every 2 seconds I can with out having to change the entire graph to every 2 seconds. This is important because sometimes things are steady but then change exponentially. and using only even numbering through out data.
You can't do exponential graphs.
Also there is not scatter plot with best fit. That just knocks out 90% of the graphs i ever need to do.
I need to do std. deviations. There is no tool to do that.
I need to take some weird R squared deal that I forgot what it means.
and basically pages doesn't make it easy to graph for anything scientific at all.
........
oh gawd i wasted way too many hours at university and high school wrestling with excel 95, excel 98 trying to do all that shite. it was either that or figure out mathematica (which while excellent, is wayyy out of my league)**
**although i cant remember if in high school i tried to get mathematica to do my algebra homework for me... it kindaa worked, i think \
I just tried to really learn pages and I must say I am very impressed right now. In many ways i think its far more powerful than word.
--earlier I said that when you apply styles it changes all the position. This can be easily avoided if you use character styles. so thats another con off the list.
--The real problem with pages is discoverability and some UI issues. Its feature set will grow with time
--Some features I would like to see ASP is the stuff previously mentioned + a works cited editor for different formating styles. I personally want one for MLA document style.
If you get access to Live Directory, the suite of Mail, iCal, and Address Book will do this now--in a fashion. By this, I mean that it works as well as Microsoft's own Entourage 2004.
That's damming Entourage with faint praise!
However it is true enough, Entourage (even 2004) as an Exchange client is an embarrassment. Mail+iCal+Address Book and especially if you add Snerdware's GroupCal is currently a better Exchange client for the Mac THAN MICROSOFT'S OWN!!!
Microsoft are of course saying that they are working on Exchange related enhancements for their next Entourage release, however they have said this for years and years and years.
Microsoft are notorious for starting with an awful product and improving it until it is 'good enough'. However Entourage as an Exchange client is still far from good enough, at least Microsoft are giving the impression now that they realise it (in the past their marketing drones used to try and kid you the Mac client was just as good as Outlook for Windows).
It would be interesting to see Ximian (the Exchange client specifically) ported to Mac OS X (not as an X11 app but as a proper Mac program).
Comments
Originally posted by humanfellow
I actually bought iWorks when it came out. I don't use it. I even regret buying it. I'm a student and no matter how I like it my school expects assignments in Microsoft Word format. I usually e-mail them in.
You know that Microsoft Office format is .doc right? You know you can save your Pages documents as .doc right?
Research. Before. You. Say. It. Doesn't. Do. What. I. Need. It. To. Do.
Originally posted by Reid
Exactly... look what happened to Internet Explorer on the Mac once Apple came out with Safari. Microsoft announced tha all future development of Mac IE would cease. Clearly shows that Microsoft is willing to abandon Mac development if Apple gets directly in their way.
MS annonced that they ceased development on IE on both Mac and Windows.
IE was/is supposed to be tightly integrated with Longhorn, and only recently have they decided to make an update for WinXP SP2.
Furthermore, MS didn't make any major updates to IE5 for Mac since it was released in 2001.
It's more likely that Apple decided to make a browser because of MS' non existant development of IE than MS dropped IE because of Safari.
Originally posted by Nak
Can it do PDF too?
Every Mac app that can print can do PDFs - great, ain't it?
Originally posted by Russell Greenwood
So was there any spreadsheety or word processor type applications back in the day that are seemingly familiar when it comes to Pages or what will become the new Numbers?
Well, there was Mesa from Athena Design, then bought by P&L Systems Ltd.
NeXTStep Mesa 2
Mac OS X Mesa 3
See this screenshot in particular. Very iWork in style.
Keynote 2 though f8cking kicks ass. I love it, quicktime, safari web snapshots, and all that.
Pages 2.0
Keynote 3.0
Numbers 2.0
Mail.app 3.0
this would be closer to the microsoft office killer we are hungering for
getting close peoples
mwsf2006, mwsf2007 on intels, iWork and iLife bundled with all Macs, yes, very promising
Originally posted by bborofka
If Apple makes a spreadsheet, it better be like the Quantrix Modeler. That thing looks sweet. I think NeXT used to make something like back in the 90s.
umm, i hate to be an ass, but no.
a majority of apple's target market for growing the brand and profits would not even know wtf
"Quantitative Modeling Software for Professionals"
is,
let alone how to spell those words.
who was it that said "you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the *ahem* american (replace with global) public"
edit:
case in point: front page of website says:
"Quantrix was the best solution for Cimpor."
Eugenio Pauperio, CIO, Cimpor
1. who the hell is eugenio?
2. why should i care about Cimpor?
3. Cimpor is one of those sucky-ass uncool boring grey-building corporate names.
3. outside of the corporate world, "best solution" is meaningless jargon
the way iWork is currently built and apple, Numbers should probably be marketed as:
Phunky-sexy-looking 30something Jane:
"i finally managed to balance my checkbook, and could afford a whole new wardrobe..!"
not meant to be sexist:
Intelligent-but-suave-looking 30something Joe:
"with iWork '06, i can just focus on my family, my business, getting on with my life"
but what do i know? besides my restraining order banning me from 1km of any Apple marketing dept employee**
**no such restraining order is in place, joke used only for effect and to tickle the ribs of appleinsider visitors. apple marketing department is cool. um, and i am not a psycho stalker..... yet.....
.............
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
It was at about this time that Steve Jobs visited and gave them one of the new NeXT computers. The NeXT made Improv possible due to its powerful NeXTSTEP programming environment. Jobs clearly "got it", and became one of the product's biggest supporters and critics, and many of the ideas that appeared in the final product were at his urging.
Improv was so popular that it became one of the few killer apps on the NeXT platform, and machines started showing up in financial officies in the thousands.
Steve has definitely been a fan of Lotus Improv which is improved in the Quantrix Modeler. I don't see him changing and moving to todays Excel clones. The natural language of Quantrix coupled with the ability to reorder data and use far fewer equations is huge to me. I think the only reason why Apple hasn't gone this route is because of the competition they wish to avoid with MS Office.
While Quantrix makes the product sound difficult or somehow aimed at just financial modelers I don't see why it wouldn't work for far more tasks.
I'd like to see Apple have something like Quantrix fused with nice graphic capability. We'll see if "Numbers" sees the light of day and what features it offers. I'm curious.
..
...
wait for it....
...
"Pages"
Originally posted by hmurchison
Sunil I think you're wrong on this one and bborofka is correct and here's why.
.........
.........
While Quantrix makes the product sound difficult or somehow aimed at just financial modelers I don't see why it wouldn't work for far more tasks.
I'd like to see Apple have something like Quantrix fused with nice graphic capability. We'll see if "Numbers" sees the light of day and what features it offers. I'm curious.
fair enough mate. i think i was in a bit of a twisted moood because my 50+ year old aunt and uncle were over for supper last night and were like "oh, i heard apple and microsoft are going to merge and apple will be no more in two years"
...will check out da wikipedia link now...
Also there's all this talk of Pages being a hybrid Word-processor/DTP program. Again, I don't buy this. When Apple describes it as a "Word processor with an incredible sense of style" they are not actually far off. All the layouts are created with just columns, text boxes, section breaks, images and text styles, all of which are standard Word processing features. All Pages does is have excellant support for these features (unlike some other word processors...) and ~40 professionally designed templates to show off what you can do with them. Just select any template and go View -> Layout to see.
Pages is in many ways more powerful than Word. I can't wait to see v2.
the only thing that doesn't fit the whole iApp regime is Keynote, it's waay too high-end, but that doesn't preclude it from being usable.
Unless there's a real breakthrough of functionality/performance like FinalCut Pro, Apple probably won't market a pro level office suite.
But I would consider that if this new spreadsheet program is based on Improv or Quantrix, that it would be pro enough, but then there's the problem of marketing two lines of pro and consumer level apps, not that it can't be done, but it's hard enough just to market a consumer level office suite like AppleWorks
Here are some cons:
--when i applied styles to stuff that was centered my text moved to the left. I am assuming that a style also includes the justification. I don't like that though. So i guess pages needs more fine grande control in that area.
--If pages wants to do bullets different than any other way i have ever seen it in an app (textedit or word). It should some how point that to users.
--I wish it wasn't so print oriented. I would like to be able to make a web page with it. In this day and age the internet is the most important medium.
--I know that you can option click the inspector icon to get multiple inspectors but i think that is a mistake. I think you should just click the inspector icon for a new inspector and click to close button on an inspector to get rid of them.
--the auto numbering when doing a list is hard to control if you don't go in order.
--I would like to be able to control the insertion and deletion of pages more easily. Maybe a column to the side like keynote.
--My biggest problem with pages is that the chart/graphing utility is far to weak. I don't care if its a consumer app there really is no excuse for the suckyness of the graphing capabilities in pages. Tables could be better but aren't terrible.
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--If pages wants to do bullets different than any other way i have ever seen it in an app (textedit or word). It should some how point that to users.
Hmm, it doesn't start them automatically (a blessing or a pain depending on your point of view), but its hardly difficult, is it? Click the 'list' button at the top and select bullets to start bullets. When you've finished, click it again and select none.
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--I would like to be able to control the insertion and deletion of pages more easily. Maybe a column to the side like keynote.
This was added with the 1.0.2 update - View -> Show Page Thumbnails
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--My biggest problem with pages is that the chart/graphing utility is far to weak. I don't care if its a consumer app there really is no excuse for the suckyness of the graphing capabilities in pages. Tables could be better but aren't terrible.
What exactly about the graphing don't you like?
--for bullets. What i mean by its not a standard format is that usually like, in textedit, if you want to make a sub series under a bullet you just press tab. pages you have to press cmd+ "]" or ""[". I've never had to do that before.
--For Graphs. The graphs I make are usually for science classes. So say i want to plot. distance vs. time. And i want the x-axis to be time and the y-axis to be distance. There is no easy way to label the graphs. There is no easy way to set the x-axis as time. I guess you could just add in your own text boxes to label. And if you enter in your own label then the labels don't move with the graph.
When entering the x & y coordinates why do i have to have the same x for a set of 2 ys. I would like to have a uniform x-axis number set, say every 15 seconds. and have a separate set for x & y coordinates. that way if i need to change from every 15 seconds to every 2 seconds I can with out having to change the entire graph to every 2 seconds. This is important because sometimes things are steady but then change exponentially. and using only even numbering through out data.
You can't do exponential graphs.
Also there is not scatter plot with best fit. That just knocks out 90% of the graphs i ever need to do.
I need to do std. deviations. There is no tool to do that.
I need to take some weird R squared deal that I forgot what it means.
and basically pages doesn't make it easy to graph for anything scientific at all.
--no equation editor.
Originally posted by NaMo4184
--For Graphs. The graphs I make are usually for science classes. So say i want to plot. distance vs. time. And i want the x-axis to be time and the y-axis to be distance. There is no easy way to label the graphs. There is no easy way to set the x-axis as time. I guess you could just add in your own text boxes to label. And if you enter in your own label then the labels don't move with the graph.
When entering the x & y coordinates why do i have to have the same x for a set of 2 ys. I would like to have a uniform x-axis number set, say every 15 seconds. and have a separate set for x & y coordinates. that way if i need to change from every 15 seconds to every 2 seconds I can with out having to change the entire graph to every 2 seconds. This is important because sometimes things are steady but then change exponentially. and using only even numbering through out data.
You can't do exponential graphs.
Also there is not scatter plot with best fit. That just knocks out 90% of the graphs i ever need to do.
I need to do std. deviations. There is no tool to do that.
I need to take some weird R squared deal that I forgot what it means.
and basically pages doesn't make it easy to graph for anything scientific at all.
........
oh gawd i wasted way too many hours at university and high school wrestling with excel 95, excel 98 trying to do all that shite. it was either that or figure out mathematica (which while excellent, is wayyy out of my league)**
**although i cant remember if in high school i tried to get mathematica to do my algebra homework for me... it kindaa worked, i think
--earlier I said that when you apply styles it changes all the position. This can be easily avoided if you use character styles. so thats another con off the list.
--The real problem with pages is discoverability and some UI issues. Its feature set will grow with time
--Some features I would like to see ASP is the stuff previously mentioned + a works cited editor for different formating styles. I personally want one for MLA document style.
my 2 cents
Originally posted by Mr. Me
If you get access to Live Directory, the suite of Mail, iCal, and Address Book will do this now--in a fashion. By this, I mean that it works as well as Microsoft's own Entourage 2004.
That's damming Entourage with faint praise!
However it is true enough, Entourage (even 2004) as an Exchange client is an embarrassment. Mail+iCal+Address Book and especially if you add Snerdware's GroupCal is currently a better Exchange client for the Mac THAN MICROSOFT'S OWN!!!
Microsoft are of course saying that they are working on Exchange related enhancements for their next Entourage release, however they have said this for years and years and years.
Microsoft are notorious for starting with an awful product and improving it until it is 'good enough'. However Entourage as an Exchange client is still far from good enough, at least Microsoft are giving the impression now that they realise it (in the past their marketing drones used to try and kid you the Mac client was just as good as Outlook for Windows).
It would be interesting to see Ximian (the Exchange client specifically) ported to Mac OS X (not as an X11 app but as a proper Mac program).