This is not a review. Nor is it a critique. This is a rant. A full on, undisguised, "God damn it all" rant. You want to see me be unreservedly and unfairly negative on a subject without even acknowledging the other side of the story? You got it!
And what is the target of my ire? What has earned so great a share of my anger? What has me so utterly cheesed off that I'm willing to go into it with the words "Fuck" and "you!" together before I even explain why?
Apple Pages.
That's right. I'm pissed as hell... at a crappy Word Processor.
My God I'm a geek.
Apple Pages is part of iWork (alongside Keynote), and it seemed like it was the long awaited successor to Appleworks, which was Clarisworks for a long time (largely because they didn't want to confuse fans of Appleworks, the Apple II's all purpose office suite of software. Though that original Appleworks wasn't as good as the old Apple Writer II. Damn, but I loved that program. But I digress.) Appleworks hasn't seen any new versions in quite some time. After Keynote came out, however, the rumor came up that Apple was finally taking on Microsoft in the one area Microsoft dominates on the Macintosh -- office productivity software.
Note, I'm not saying Microsoft Office is the best software on a Mac, or even the best office software. I'm just saying it's the dominant software.
Anyway, Pages looked like the long awaited second stage of Apple taking its platform back. Keynote is a gorgeous piece of software -- easily as capable, more fun and prettier than Powerpoint -- but it's presentation software. I mean, who cares? Word processing, on the other hand... that's something everyone needs to do. And unless you're the kind of person who knows from all this and vastly prefers to work in the most stripped down text editor possible, you want your word processor to be mature without bloat.
Microsoft Word has bloat. A lot of it. Superfluous features no human needs. "Helpful" systems that inhibit your productivity. A "Mac" that looks more like a Banana Junior offering to help you format a letter.
Yes. We have something even sillier than Clippy. But again, I digress.
The thought was Apple would produce a Word Processor without bloat -- that would take advantage of Apple's rendering engines to be pretty to work with, and clean enough to not get in the way of your composing your documents. And, of course, it would be a triumph of User Interface. Apple's User Interface engineering's really what made them famous, after all.
Though, it's worth noting they've been forgetting that over time.
I got a copy of iWork so I could help evaluate it for the school. Yes, we paid for it. And I loaded it on and have spent the last couple of weeks doing all my non-Websnark writing in it (Websnark I write directly in an MT window. Font tags and all.)
These are two weeks I won't get back. No matter how desperately I want to. As God is my witness, this program sucks.
First off. It's not a word processor. Oh, it claims to be. It says "Word Processor" on the back of the package. It says "word processor" on the website. It sounds for all the world like they want you to... oh, I don't know... process words with this piece of shit. It's only when you actually look at the ad copy more closely that you begin to see the problem:
The word processor with incredible sense of style.
The easiest way to look good on paper, Pages lets you create documents that look like you had a design team working round the clock. But, no, itĚs just you, taking advantage of a new word processor with great style, an easy-to-use powerhouse that gives you all the tools you need to create superb-looking documents.
All that, it's worth noting, is true. Pages is optimized to help you create superb-looking documents. It comes packaged with a ton of templates designed to lay out graphics and columns and shit oh so easily.
What this program sucks like a thousand vacuums set on "too fucking high for safe cleaning of homes" at doing is the creation of content. It is wholly oriented to presentation.
I'm a writer. I write. Sometimes I get paid for it. The words I put down matter to me. And I like to have the tools at hand to simply create and convey them. I have no more interest in setting them into ad copy layouts than I do putting them into a plastic binder. I want my word processor to stay out of my way until I get stuck, and then help me jolt my brain into being unstuck. Most of all, I want the word processor to be as intuitive as humanly possible. To just do what I need it to do, in ways that require a minimum of thought and a minimum of fuss, while giving me the feedback I need to keep track of what I'm doing.
Impossible, you think? Well, here's a short list of Word Processors that have managed to do this, to the point that deciding between them is usually left to whim, technology (I can't easily use Wordperfect for Mac, for example, due to its Classic-only implementation) editorial fiat, or some other intangible:
Mariner Write. Nisus Writer. AbiWord. Openoffice.org. WordPerfect for Mac. WriteNow. WordPerfect for Windows (any version), Wordperfect for Linux. WordPerfect for DOS 4.2 through 6.0+ inclusive. Appleworks (Mac version). Mellel. Steveperfect. And yes, Microsoft Word. Many versions. (Though none of them were ever as good as Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac, which has to be the best Microsoft product ever.)
So, please don't assume I'm overly picky. I have used every last of the above programs cheerfully, and found they've provided the feedback I needed and the features I used, and (mostly) either got out of my way or let me turn off the features I didn't like. I might not be easy to incredibly impress, since I have so many choices, but I'm not that hard to please.
And then we have Pages.
Fucking Pages.
First off, it has incredibly dense controls for document appearance. Ways of setting not just the margins and the columns but the word spacing, the character spacing, the kerning, the ligatures. Templates aplenty. Powerful style selection features. I was actually impressed when I first booted it up.
And then I decided to change the font I was working in. No offense, but I don't like to write in helvetica. I prefer a serif font for composing. It's a little easier on my eyes.
Why I'd think that would offend you is beyond me.
Anyway, this is when I discovered it had no integrated font controls.
This stunned me. So I opened up its inspector. And the inspector had kerning controls and media controls for graphics or music files or movies and list controls and tab controls and... and....
And no font controls. No list of what the font is. Or the font size is. To get that, you have to open the font control panel. The font control panel which is the same OS X default cocoa font control panel used in things like Textedit. The font control panel designed by a retarded vole who only really wanted to use one font and felt everyone else should do the same.
This stunned me. I mean... this was font choice. I was used to word processing programs giving me multiple routes to go about doing this -- a window in the toolbar listing it. Something in the "inspector." A font menu item that would list all the fonts in alphabetical order. The idea that there was only one place for it stunned me. It was cumbersome
Fine. I decided to change the default document font. I might as well not have to go through this very often, right?
Only... there's no way to do that.
Let me say that again, with italics to properly describe my shock: there is no way to change the default document font.
You see, Pages does everything with styles. And styles are set up in your template. Period. If you want to change the font you work with, you need to change those styles, save them into a new template, and set up your program to open that template by default instead of "blank template."
Here's the thing, though. If you decide to do that... you have to change all the styles. Before you start typing, I would add, because you don't want your content to actually get saved into your template. You can't just change the body style and be done with it. If you do that, when you do a list, your list will draw off of list template and boom -- helvetica. And while you're at it, you should turn off all the crappy things Apple turns on by default in their 'blank' template. Like the extra 12 point space after paragraphs which most people who write online don't use because they need to do two hard returns to make it look right. Or hyphenation. They have fucking hyphenation turned on by default.
So. You spend a good long time creating a template that just gives you a nice, simple, basic sheet of paper, doesn't add in shit you don't want it to add in, working in the font you want to work in. At last, you begin typing. And one of the words you're typing for one of your projects is 'perception,' but you realize it's not exactly the word you want to use. So you decide to hit the old thesaurus.
Only there's no thesaurus.
They have a convenient slidebar for adjusting the spacing between letters but they don't have a thesaurus.
Fine. You open up fucking Dictionary.com and select the fucking thesaurus function and find another word that means fucking perception and you move on and you decide to right justify the next line, so you hit command-r....
And nothing happens.
So you try command-shift-r. Still no go.
So you look it up. And discover that the fucking alignment tools -- which have been command or command shift L, R and C since the beginning of fucking time on the Macintosh -- are now Command-{, Command-}, and Command-|.
Command-|.
If you want to center something, you have to press command, shift, and the straight line key.
It gets even better. Font size has been controlled by hitting either command or command-shift and the greater-than or less-than keys in every program where font has been an issue since Mac OS 2 at least. But not Pages. Oh no! Those are zoom keys. And the zoom keys in those programs -- Command Plus and Command Minus? Those are the font size changers. In other words, they reversed the function of those keys compared to every other program on the market for no reason at all.
And it hit me. This software program breaks the cardinal rule of the Macintosh. This software program actually breaks the single greatest innovation the Macintosh brought to software of any kind. Through all evolutions of the Macintosh Operating System, every program works basically the same way. The same keystrokes do the same thing in every package. The same menu items do the same thing. There is unity. There was a day when you could excitedly tell a DOS or even Windows user "hey, it's a Mac -- all the software works the same way. You know how to use one program, you can use any program."
Pages requires me to learn how to run Pages. It gives me pseudo page layout capabilities (not as effectively as Microsoft Publisher did in 1995, I would add -- and Publisher sucked) but lacks basic tools for writing. It makes me work for the feedback I want and it interrupts my train of thought so I can remember how to center. It's a pretty program, and I admit that it saves files about half the size of Word's files (though it's worth noting that I don't care as much in these days of 120 GB hard drives -- a 300 kb file or a 144 kb file makes little difference to me), but that's not enough.
Oh, and it reads and saves Word files. But then, I have Abiword. And Openoffice.org. And Mellel. And Microsoft Word. So opening and saving Word files really doesn't impress me.
Oh, and it saves HTML files.
I swear to Christ, it renders HTML code that's worse than Word's.
And that's the total crime of this software. Not only does it break all the rules... not only does it lack things any Word Processor should have while loading it down with layout options that prepress professionals would rarely use... but it literally makes you compare it to Microsoft Word the whole time, and Word comes out ahead in essentially every category.
The Word-killer? This piece of shit software is the best advertising Microsoft Word has had in years.
I've evaluated it. I'm done. I'm going back to Mellel for my own projects and -- for those times when Word compatibility is completely required -- I'm going back to Word. If I want something clean and simple? I'll use BBEdit or Textedit. Or fucking Emacs. If I need something Word Processed, I'll use a program designed to create content, not stock flyers.
Someone call me when Apple decides to release a word processor.
