Pages 5 features checklist

The "minimalism thing" is great. Editing is the heart of beautiful, useful, delightful design.

The trick to editing, though, is in carving off excess elegantly. Minimal means "nothing superfluous," not "too little."

What we're seeing hereisn't minimalism: it's skeletal, a sketch.

Sekoya wrote:

And consider those two points:

1. Apple wanted to create and had ideas for how to create an even easier to use Pages.
2. Apple wanted to have complete feature parity between Mac, iOS and iCloud, it wanted to have robust synching. Apple wanted to make Pages a multi-user application (synching a document between different locations and having multiple people working on it has quite a few similarities on the implementation side). Apple also wanted a fully touch optimised UI for Pages (on iOS). And it wanted a high-quality in-browser version.

I challenge you to tell me why the goals set out in point (1) and (2) are not worthy goals or why a different strategy to achieve them would have be undeniable better.

The goals in points 1 and 2 are worthy goals, and a different strategy wasn't necessary and wouldn't have been better. The mistake was in thinking that Pages 5 would be a replacement for Pages 4.3. It isn't. Pages 4.3 and Pages 5 are entirely different kinds of software. They also forgot to take into account how we use Pages.

It's like removing a refrigerator and replacing it with a slick, modern, efficient dishwasher. Now everyone is rightly up in arms about how they are going to wash their dishes in a refrigerator.

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

↪ Template file storage location moved …somewhere?

They have gone to...

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iWork.Pages/Data/Library/Application Support/User Templates

(at least on my machine that is).

A container is a Package just like an Application - to drill down into it you have to "Show Package Contents".

There are similar "containers" for Keynote and Numbers. So presumably (but not checked) they have similar role for those apps.

HTH.

Jony Ive shouldn't be fired. He's really good at hardware design. He just shouldn't be allowed to come within 100 yards of software development.

What, you mean something is there? All I see are a lot of flashlight apps.

And the best thing is that BeLight (as in Swift Publisher) might just be small enough to listen.

No, I think this is reprehensible. You cannot globally change the file association of Pages documents, the system just changes it back. If you accidentally double click a file it will open in 5.0 stripping it of its compatibility. I can't risk this. I'm moving 5.0 to a USB stick and removing it from my system. This alone proves this wasn't an innocent act.

Me thinks that now that Steve is gone, the wannabees are stepping in to show how Apple ought to be run. How could they not fulwell know what they were doing? It's either incompetence or hubris. I haven't used Microsoft products for 10 years but I was within 5 minutes of buying Word until I found 4.3 hidden on my system.

Export to Plain Text is still there.

Insert MathType Equation is still there.

Gavin Lawrie wrote:

As goals they are just fine (just one app, cross platform feature set). But for an existing product it is not OK to do this in a way that disorients and disengages the people who use / rely upon it. Maybe it is a calculated decision by Apple - but that doesn't make it an OK decision for those adversely affected by it.

It is quite probable that hardly anyone used Pages and even fewer used it as a pro-tool. But for those that did, a change that appears to 'break' large collections of documents and undermine substantial investments without any warning, and no clear migration path seems a harsh outcome - and one that is unwarranted.

Perhaps Apple reasoned that since they got away with it (just) with FCP X, they would try again. But as I hear (I'm not a user of FCP), they partly got away with it because FCP X was / is a substantially improved app compared to what went before. Difference is that so far early reports are that iWork updates are largely feature removing: hard to see how this will win people over to the cause.

I guess what will happen will be pro users will move off to other solutions - which would be a shame. There is much to like for pro-users in the iWork 09 apps, and they had some interesting advantages over other apps. It is currently not at all clear that the same will be true of the latest crop of iWork apps.

The zero communication certainly was bad and unnecessary (it maybe is too much to expect them to mention this in the keynote, but a paragraph at the bottom of the iWork webpage and a clear warning when running Pages 5 for the first time should have been there and would have been in Apple's interest; though admitting the removal of features and saying nothing about whether they will be added again might have been similarly bad PR).

FCP had the 'advantage' that it could not open and unwittingly screw up existing documents and that it was relatively clear that for everybody that opening old projects was not possible with FCP X.

The compatibility with the iCloud (and iOS) version, the multi-user edit capabilities (do they work only from the iCloud site or also from the native Mac apps?) plus some of the UI changes that are generally welcomed is what was supposed to win people over but whether people can be won over depends here directly on how many features an existing user relied on. But then again, maybe the winning over is targetted at new users (in particular the collaborative editing and the iCloud version can win over all those people who didn't use iWork because they needed, at least occasionally, to let persons without a Mac edit documents).

And I have to say that, even as a died in the wool Mac user (since 1992), I didn't consider investing into learning the full feature set of iWork a really profitable enterprise. I use Keynote for all my presentations but I don't add much animation and do all graphical work in Omnigraffle and import it as a pdf into Keynote. I mainly use(d) it because of it great looking templates and its general ease of use (and predictability of which I have zero for MS Office). And I use Pages for all my personal letters (again because it looks good and is easy to use). I've done very little in Numbers, not least because I know Excel much better and consider it one of most stable and reliable Microsoft apps (except for making charts and graphs).

I use Latex and InDesign (and before that FrameMaker) for text and layout work, Omnigraffle for graphical work and Matlab (and for a few simple things Excel) for calculations and figures. As I said, I have always considered investing into iWorks a risky proposition (with the exception of Keynote as Steve Jobs used it himself). It's not just the lack of a track record by Apple, it's also the lack of a large userbase. Which works in two ways, it would indicate a very good and useful product but it also give a company the incentive to keep investing into it and keep the core concept (feature set) alive.

One could thus say that I'm not enraged about the new Pages because this (r)evolution was something I considered a very distinct possibility.

If Character Styles are gone, have List Styles gone as well?

I have been scouring what passes for a Pages 5 online manual and can't see any mention of either.

Peter

The function of list styles has been changed. I wrote about it in another thread:

I opened a document that I'd been working on in the previous version of Pages. It has several styles, incuding a bulleted list style called "main bullet".

I attempted to apply that style to a section of text, and while it did indent the text properly, it did not add bullets. (Also, in the Style panel a bullet does not appear next to the "main bullet" style as it does in Pages 4. This was my first clue that something was wrong.)

So I went back in the text to a bulleted list that uses the "main bullet" style. I selected the text, then went to the Style panel and chose "main bullet" > update style. This did not seem to help. The "main bullet" style still has no bullet next to it in the Style panel, and when I tried again to apply it to some text, the bullet doesn't appear.

I decided to try a different style, in this case "body". I went to a section that has the "main bullet" style, selected it, and applied "body". The indentation changed, but it did not remove the bullet as it was supposed to.

Is this a bug, or do styles work differently in Pages 5?

It appears that styles do not include formatting like bullets, which, if true, is a huge problem.

Is this some kind of sick joke? This is by far the worst "upgrade" of a product I've ever seen. Aside from the fact that it runs faster, Pages 5 is an absolute piece of garbage and entirely unusable for professionals. I'm going to have to install Word now, which makes me really mad.

enteecee wrote:

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.

And what is wrong with giving people an implementation of a subset of these goals (that is internally consistent) once that subset is ready?

(I have an answer but I'm curious what other people think.)

I totally have to agree even though I love my Apple products and to me Apple can do no wrong but they totally missed the boat on this one. I really feel they have dumb this app down so much that I can't get anything accomplished now. I need for apple to get this fixed and get it fixed soon because all of my documents are within pages and it's hindering my productivity.

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

Hi Sekoya

Just keep thinking that. Hold the nice thoughts and ignore what is actually there in front of you on the screen. 😉

My motto is generally more along the lines of never attributing to malice what can be explained by virtue. Not that it always can be explained by virtue or that I always manage to see things from a positive perspective.