Pages 5 features checklist

You have stated the problem very accurately. “Apple wanted…” Exactly. However, there are a lot of “apple users” who wanted all sorts of other things, and over the last ten years, the corporation has become too bloated and diversified to listen properly. Apple took over the music business, the phone business and the pad business. Well done! However, people like, er, me, who liked to do something like, er, DTP, cheaply and simply within the Mac UI - things like Pages were a good idea. It was a clever attempt to straddle WP & DTP - thus the 2 sets of templates.

The natural development of this would be to increase the DTP capability and simplify the WP. The WP could then be applied easily in phone-land and pad-land, while the more sophisticated DTP would satisfy the “lost tribe” of, er, computer users.

In fact, of course, the “lost tribe” were abandoned as falling somewhere between the $3,000 Pro buyers (who can afford software to match), and the mass-consuming phoners & padders who live in the happy world of finger-painting style $5 “apps”.

So iWork was dumbed down for iOS. And now the iOS version is ported to Mac OS in a classic act of top-down market rationalisation.

This sort of creative killing happened in the 80s in the Movie business, once the old tyrannical but visionary studio heads had gone, and the suits had arrived. Which pretty much describes what we saw at that Special Event on October 22nd.

This is exactly right.

And directly to Sekoya's Challenge:

1) Those goals are worthy ones. Great ones, in fact.

2) A better strategy would have been to delay those goals until they could impliment them well. Apple is famous for waiting until they get it right before release, so we know they can do it when they care.

The unfortunate message to be clearly drawn from this is that there are some products that they just don't care about working well and/or some users that they don't care to serve.

It feels sad and ironic to me that after 20 years of showing PC people that I could do serious work on Macs, it's only now that everyone owns an Apple product (or two) that it's really starting to seem like Apple doesn't believe it anymore.

It's wierd to think that Apple employees are putting together their own documents without being able to view facing pages. Without Mail Merge working well. They must be using something else, which strikes me as odd.

I am appalled. This is like a schools LITE version. It has totally runied a huge document I was working on and I can't go back. How can Apple treat its customers like this. They knew there would be a fuss because they did not remove iWork 09 during the upgrade process.

This is a disgrace. I cannot add additional pages to the document without doing the whole layout on each page from scratch. In the past I just added a new page from the template chose or duplicated an existing page and modified the content.

I am disgusted by this.

PaulBee wrote:

I guess what I'm saying is that as long as Pages 4.3 remains a viable option, maybe the biggest issue here on Apple's part isn't the features themselves as much as it is communication.

Sure. Mostly it is communication. If Apple had seen fit to run a semi-public beta (much like they did with iOS and OS X) they could have defused much of this, as the pro users would either have tried the beta or heard about it. But it would also be good to have a path that saw 4.3 upgraded - that it has remained viable over the years since it appeared with barely maintenance upgrades is a testament to how good it was when it arrived. A few of the changes in 5 are long overdue (e.g. getting RTL text handling to work properly): it is a pity (or perhap ironic) that those people who waited and waited for these upgrades to appear may not now be able to access them (for fear of breaking everything else).

Gavin Lawrie wrote:

it is a pity (or perhap ironic) that those people who waited and waited for these upgrades to appear may not now be able to access them (for fear of breaking everything else).

Exactly where I'm sitting now.

I am completely fine with the new UI. I think it looks great, I just want the actual features to be returned, then it will be an overall improvement

Agree- I like the contextually aware Inspector that's no longer drifting in it's own window. It jsut doesn't have many tools left in it!

Yes, it would be an excellent strategy, and it is consistent with their current practices. They have MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. They have iMac and Mac Pro. They had Final Cut Pro and iMovie, they had Aperature, iPhoto, and Preview, and even though they've screwed some of that up for a while, it is clear that it is a good strategy.

Personally, I don't care if they find a different way to implement a feature. I do care if a feature is missing or stunted.

Yes, you are right. The slogan needs to change from: "Think Different." They've gone past "What Were They Thinking" to "Were they thinking?"

Sekoya wrote:

Interesting, keep using Pages 4.x is suddenly a worse option than using Word? What part of Pages 4.x or Word changed with the release of Pages 5?

The part of Pages 4.x that changed with the release of Pages 5 is its future. Word has a future, Pages 4.x does not. We eventually have to replace Pages 4.x with something, and that something is not Pages 5, which is not its successor, but an entirely different kind of software with the same name. I'm sure that Pages 5 is delightful, but not for people who need the feature set of Pages 4.3.

Someone needs to be fired (Jonny Ive?). This whole minimalist thing is just stupid. The hubris of doing this is reprehensible.

Think I may have to go back to Swift Publisher, unless Apple fix this mess.