Oh what joy to find someone on this Forum who agrees that upgrades are often more like downgrades. ‘Improvements’ are almost always impoverments. This has been my experience since I first started using a Mac in 1991. I was overwhelmed by the elegance, simplicity, intuitiveness, immense functionality and virtual absence of bugs and faults in System 7, which is where I came in. The journey has been consistently downhill ever since, though of course the widespread use of the internet forced certain inevitable changes, which I accept cheerfully. It’s the gratuitous and pointless changes, random, unnecessary redesigns of the interface, ‘streamlining’ forcing you to search for some dot on the screen somewhere, which you have to click to open up options that used to be in plain sight, for even an inexperienced user to see.
SG asks for an example of a loss of functionality: Every wordprocessor or page layout software (including Pages 4.0) I’ve ever used had some more or less universal options in the File menu: Open; Close; Save; Save As; Export, maybe, Revert, etc.
Save As enabled you to duplicate, rename (if you wanted to), change the location of (if you wanted to) a document in one simple operation. It was one of the mose useful functions of the software. In Pages 4.1, to do the same thing you have to perform three separate operations Duplicate, Rename and Move to, involving sometimes having to navigate towhere you want to move it to rather than it staying where it is by default. While on that subject, when you use Rename, and click Save, as you do, by instinct, the changed name disappears and you have to do it all over again, eventually realising that you can save only by hitting the return key. This is sloppy, careless design, undertaken for no apparent reason or benefit.
Where in 4.0 you used to click Export, to create a PDF, for example, you had a couple of clicks to make and there was your document, by default in the same location as the original, unless you had opted to move it somewhere else. In Pages 4.1 the exported document is liable to go by default to some entirely different location; I haven’t yet figured out what rules the software is following, but the former arrangement was better by a country mile, trust me.
SG makes the point that the improvements lie in the improved cross-platform compatibility etc. That may represent an improvement, for some people, but it comes at a cost to the former quality of the software in question, which for many people is not a price worth paying.
There are counterparts in Numbers to all the points I have made about Pages. And for me you are absolutely right that Numbers 09 was a superior spreadsheet experience. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet; its basic functions should be universal. It would take me too much time to go through and remind myself of all the impovverments and annoyances in the latest version I've got, but its not being able to open documents I've made on it is high on the list.
Bring back Clarisworks
