Pages 5 features checklist

This thread, now 66 pages (excuse the pun) long, seems to me to be a serious lobbying venue that should go directly to Apple. I neither know how to do that nor do I currently have the time.

It also seems that the two applications could co-exist, perhaps named differently.

If all this falls on deaf ears at Apple, perhaps some more public lobying is in order.

It peeves me quite a lot when someone else decides I don't need a piece of software I've come to love and rely on, and replaces it with a vastly inferior substitute. Then I have to perform feats of technology to get back what I had, only to wonder how long it will be supported and further developed.

We are the consumers and we certainly have the power to create a market demand that is very likely to be heeded, if the manufacturer/publisher (Apple) wants to keep and even increase its market share.

Soozzi wrote:

This thread, now 66 pages (excuse the pun) long, seems to me to be a serious lobbying venue that should go directly to Apple. I neither know how to do that nor do I currently have the time.

Absolutely, except it's not that visible - I am not trying to plug myself professionally, but I do advise companies on crisis containment, and THIS is exactly the first thing I tell them: "Give angry users a place you control where to vent off, otherwise they'll go in more public places, and their complaint will make more damage."

We need to do exactly this, make our frustration visible to the outside world and not just Apple:

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

Please remember to tell Apple what we need from them at:

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

All I want to do right now is get the date and time in my footnotes to automatically update when I open or edit a document. Important when I am editing and comparing data and presentations. It was easy in the previous version. I can't even find a reference to this. 5 thumbs down.

Just use 4.3 until this is fixed. Why torture yourself?

Added

1. Right to Left text ie Arabic, Farsi & Hebrew. Uncertain about Pashtu

Pashto (or Pashtu, dilect differences) works fantastic. However, I believe that the right-to-left feature was an addition to OSX Mavericks, not Pages. The iWork suite in addition to Mavericks now fully supports it. The wait is finally over! Now there is no need for me to use Windows while writing something in Pashto!

MrGrigri wrote:

Added

1. Right to Left text ie Arabic, Farsi & Hebrew. Uncertain about Pashtu

I believe that the right-to-left feature was an addition to OSX Mavericks, not Pages.

But RTL always worked just fine in TextEdit, Mellel, NIsus Writer, long before Mavericks. It was really only iWork which had bugs that made it unsuitable. So it is Pages which has changed.

I am convinced that the reason Apple went to the contextual menu format on Pages 5 is because on an iPad or smaller touchscreen, you cannot easily get in and out of menus. By using the contextual menu format, whatever part of the document that the user touches becomes an automatic menu item shown in the sidebar. For that reason, I doubt that Apple will ever be able to incorporate most of the items lost in pages 4.3, because that would require the introduction of a multitude of menus.

So, Apple has created a word processor for the iPad and forced it on desktop users. How many people want/need to use a low powered wordprocessor to collaborate on documents with friends? The answer is: ****** few. Collaboration is mostly used in commercial settings where pages 5 has very limited utility. Pages 5 is a dandy, spiffy, clever and ultimately useless application for commercial use.

But, what do I know. I'm just a guy who has used Pages for commercial use since 2006....

In response to question about just using Pages 4.3, there is no way to know how long Apple will "support" that application by letting it even run and the Mac operating system. It could die tomorrow for all we know. As a result, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my business to convert documents to a format that I know will survive and to an application that I can be pretty sure will survive (Nisus writer Pro). I cannot use Pages 5.0 in my business because I have some Macs that will not support Mavericks and therefore will not support 5.0. A system of interconnected computers using both 4.3 and 5.0 is not possible.

APP Store Ratings continue to erode for Pages 5

1 to 2 stars 69.7%

3 star 6.5%

4 to 5 stars 23.6%

1 star 54%

Over half of all reviewers rate Pages 5 a one star.... Yikes!

'Cause there isn't an option for 0 stars...:(

Tom Gewecke,

Yes and no. I believe that the developer had to write the code them selves, but now it's included in the SDK. But the iWork has changed for the better. I don't know why people are not liking the new iWork suite, but I'm loving it.

You only need to read afew posts to see exactly why people don't like it: dozens of major features and functions stripped out. Stuff we depend on.

I'm genuinely gald if you've got a product that meets your needs, but I must say that those needs must have been pretty lightweight.

@crumvoc

I'm only speculating as well, and who knows why Apple does anything, but I personally like the change from the many-tabbed inspector which was full of greyed-out / inapplicable options much of the time, to the context-based format panel.

I will add the disclaimer that unlike you, I am NOT a pro user of Pages, and I have used it only moderately and occasionally for the last 5 years. So I mean no disrespect to any of your workflows that may have been suddenly disrupted.

However, I don't think that the speculations around Apple making their Pages 5.0 OSX design choices based on what works for the iPad are accurate. I think the OSX feature set is minimal mainly because it's a rewritten, 1.0 software product. I think the context-based panels were chosen for both iOS and OSX versions because that is actually better UI design. I'm sure there is some subjectivity involved in that, and some would disagree, but if you actually study / research User Interface Design and read any article about the core principles, you'll find that contextual choices / limiting visibility of non-relevant choices is a fundamental on almost every list.

From the Wikipedia article on "Principles of user interface design":

"The visibility principle: The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don't overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information"

Of course, when you are a pro user, and are used to finding choices in a certain place, changing or removing those choices is counter-intuitive. However, from a general usability perspective, particularly for new or casual users, I believe it is a far better choice to go with context-based options, and that Apple's decision in this regard is well-supported by User Interface principles.

This of course, does not excuse or explain the outright removal of capabilities (as has been discussed on this thread in-depth). But my personal hope / expectation is that most of those missing features will be restored to the OSX version, regardless of what happens on iOS. There are already significant differences in feature sets and capabilities in the latest versions of Pages for OSX, iOS and iCloud / browser, so there is very little evidence that they are meant to be identical or be limited to only the lowest common denominator of the platforms... Rather, I believe the contextual panel is a new interface based on current UI / UX principles, and that the limited features are due to a buggy / incomplete version 1.0 of what is essentially a new product.

Just my 2 cents.

MrGrigri wrote:

Tom Gewecke,

Yes and no. I believe that the developer had to write the code them selves, but now it's included in the SDK.

Interesting! I would not have guessed that Mavericks as such played any role in this, since OS X has provided full RTL support for all apps other than iWork since 10.6 or so, as explained in notes like

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4464

After 66 pages it is hard to tell whether I am reposting an already reported "flaw/upgrade/enhacement/problem" but for what it is worth:

1) Inline images retain placement, but any floating images lose placement. Locking and grouping do not improve this.

2) After pages touches your document you can't reopen it with 4.3

Workaround:

have to restore from backup so you can touch it with Pages 4.3

make all images inline images

open with pages 5

refloat the images.

Don't understand how Apple could mess up something so basic as formatting in a formatting program. The fact that there are only 66 pages of complaints is a testiment to how few people really use pages. This was my first project using it, and perhaps my last.