Pages 5 features checklist

emandelapaz wrote:

4. Click on FILL and select IMAGE FILL.

Peter Thomson

emandelapaz, thanks for the response. I see what you are doing, but I believe this is different than putting an image in a cell.

[continued; sorry]

Selecting the image that you just pasted into the cell, the Inspector/Wrap Insector palette's "Object Placement" is fixed "inline" and not changeable, but there are six different ways to wrap the (table cell) text around/behind/in front of the image, plus two different ways of text fitting with numerically adjustable parameters. For a mock example, see <https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54668219/Pages43-TwP.jpg>. (In addition, the table is rotated 90°, which Pages 5.0 cannot do.) Furthermore, selecting the so-pasted image in the table cell, the Inspector's "Graphics Inspector" and "Metrics Inspector" allow you to further tweak the image in multiple ways. Finally, double-clicking the image brings up the floating (grey) palette to edit the mask/cropping. All of this functionality is lost in Pages 5.0. (Peter, I have no idea how to itemize all this loss.)

In turn, to be fair and as best as I can see, Pages 5.0 does retain all the "Image Fill" and "Advanced Image Fill" functionality of Pages 4.3.

Yes, and iWeb was essentially a copy of RapidWeaver - Apple went into competition and undercut one of their own supporters to create a software they had no intention of developing further.

iWeb was not a copy of RW. I used iWeb quite a lot and I've used RW for about 6 years. They have similar goals - easy creation of web sites - but the whole way they operate is quite different.

RapidWeaver is still flourishing of course.

Apple no more copied RW to make iWeb than they copied Word to make Pages.

Theory as why a reasonable company with commitment to user experience would put out this application, incorporating several different priorities:

1) Apple wanted iWorks to docs to be transparent across platforms. This strengthens the ecosystem (which if you haven't noticed has been the center their business model for at least 5 years), and users demanded it. I put in several requests for it at the Feedback page.

They may even want feature parity, which would be downright stupid.

2) This required a ground-up rewrite, since these programs were originally written when iPhones were barely in development, and years from release.

3) They see their actual competition as not MS Office, but GoogleDocs. Office is not growing it's user base. GDocs is- massivley. And a lot of that growth is Apple users who want to work crossplatform, and don't need full feature-set.

SO:

Even if they recognize the weaknessess of the apps they just released, they feel the need to compete with GDocs now, before it gains insuperable market share. The versions just released may be poor substitutes for iWork '09 or Office, but they're very competetive with GDocs feature set and are much more slick at the same price point.

They may be abandoning business customers or they may not: if not, they clearly believe that they are better off expanding their user base now and adding features as they go. In a year or two they may well be touting "the best word processor ever" bcuase it adds back in features that most of the newly expanded user-base doesn't know were there 8 years before in a previous version.

I beg to differ - RW was in developement first and they are conceptually identical.

They may be abandoning business customers or they may not: if not, they clearly believe that they are better off expanding their user base now and adding features as they go. In a year or two they may well be touting "the best word processor ever" because it adds back in features that most of the newly expanded user-base doesn't know were there 8 years before in a previous version.

All good possibilities. But as long time users of iWork, as customers, WE NEED INFORMATION FROM APPLE. We need to know what Apple's game plan is so that we can make decisions whether to jump ship or not. I'm willing to curate and safeguard Pages 09 for a year or so if I KNOW that apple plans to make Pages back into a word processor. What's frustrating is knowing that they will probably remain tight-lipped about it and the only way we as decision makers will know their plans is to wait two years and watch.

Not only did Apple abandon their customers, they were also dishonest in their "What's New" description of Pages 5.0. Nowhere does Apple state that many of the features found in Pages 4.3 were removed. Only through downloading the new version and using it did we find out we were using a severly crippled version of this software. As I indicated in my review of Pages 5.0, what I could do in version 4.3 (produce a book for self-publishing) is impossible using the new version. The feature set I had come to rely on to do that project just disappeared. The information we all needed should have been on the FrontPage, so to speak. It wasn't. I don't expect it will appear there any time soon either.

"...jump ship?" Many, including myself, already have. We need the software to WORK for us, not the other way around. It's that simple. If it doesn't work for what I need it to do, I'll find something that will. And do it NOW.

The other way to know Apple's plans is to wait and see and come to work one morning only to find out 4.3 will no longer open because of a change in OSX..... I'm leavin' if Apple doesn't give a roadmap very soon. Cannot risk my business trying to guess what Apple will do. Leaving is no happy thought either, as I will have to figure out a way to convert over 5k Pages documents to something else..... I wonder if anyone is looking at a class action suit? (I'm not)...

I've pasted your comment, along with a couple others, into the Feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html

and noted them as coming from the forum, so that the folks responsible for improvements have a better chance to realize how upset we are.

My main issue right now is text language. Whilst the new auto-detection per paragraph actually works quite well, it keeps assuming I'm using US English rather than British English! I haven't found a way around this yet without forcing it all to British English, which then messes up the Spanish parts.

If your prefer Pages 4.3 to Pages 5, and have had to reinstall from the original iWork'09 disk (which installs Pages 4.0), the standalone updater to iWork 9.3 (with Pages 4.3) is at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1563

This updater will work to put you back to Pages 4.3 in Mavericks.

Peter Thomson wrote:

I have questionaires that I use in language classes for small children that contain 10 images in one cell. I can still format a page to do the same thing, but working with a table made it much more easy to do.

Tristan,

Thanks for the inputs regarding pasting and manipulating images in tables.

Many users, myself included, use tables NOT just to organize text, but also for its ease in organizing graphics, just like Peter correctly pointed out. The loss of the ability to manipulate graphics within tables will be sorely missed. Hopefully, temporarily.

Thank you so much for this Tristan. This has been a real life saver!

I was one of the stupid people that couldn't imagine that Pages 5.0 could be so bad, so I ended up deleting Pages 4.3 on my MacBook Pro before thoroughly testing. Then, when it realised my mistake, I tried copying iWork app from an iMac that still had 4.3 but I didn't know which other files &amp; folders I needed so nothing worked. Have been tearing my hair out on this one most of the week!

I'm just relieved to get 4.3 back and trust that it won't be long before Apple put all the missing features into 5.1!

Questions about next steps. I am completly new to being an unsatisfied Apple customer. I have never been anything but a raving fan. I am past being angry. Still disappointed (more in the way that it was handled than the software itself) but I am ready to move on to next steps, but am not sure what those next steps are.

I'm willing to wait a bit before trying to migrate back to Word. I don't want to wait around too long and suddenly find Pages 4.3 inoperable in a new OS update.

Am I foolish for hoping for a "New Coke/Coke Classic" ending?

There are obviously a few of us unhappy with the change. Is that number large enough to make Apple even flinch and reconsider or am I sitting on the "mistreated and pouting train" - as the "its a new day train" is leaving the station?

Any chance they will break off Pages 4.3 under a new name as mac based software for the specialist not the ios masses?

Do we think there is a chance Apple will make a statement about future direction for those of us who need a robust, Mac based, word processor and DTP?

Is moving to Word the best and most reliable option for those of us who loved Pages? Other software I am not aware of?

jSimon0202 wrote:

Questions about next steps.

There are obviously a few of us unhappy with the change. Is that number large enough to make Apple even flinch and reconsider or am I sitting on the "mistreated and pouting train" - as the "its a new day train" is leaving the station?

I think getting Apple to state that they will continue to support Pages 4.3 as they work on new versions of Pages 5 is not too difficult - the code base is still there, and all they have to do is add a Pages 4.3 compatibility workstream to each OS change.

But we need to make sure they understand we really want this and there's many of us - hence, I repeat my plead to like, share and invite friends to this page

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Apple-give-us-back-iWork-09/169283333271374