pages

Apple have just released a new app called Pages, which is part of their new iWork 05 package. It's difficult to describe what it does easily, but it's a desktop publishing, multi-media presentations, page layout, word processing kind of thing. Fully integrated with the iLife suite of apps, it offers 40 lovely looking templates that can be easily customised to create a huge variety of documents limited only by your imagination. Personally, I wasn't that interested in the templates, all I wanted was an Apple branded word processor and Pages provides me with exactly what I was looking for. A stylish interface offers an amazing array of formating tools as powerful as anything in Word. Although, it is important to note that this isn't meant to be a serious alternative to Word because Pages doesn't include the usual pro editing and collaboration tools found in that programme. That said, this is a simple to use, deceptively powerful, word processor for the rest of us. A very fine app indeed.

There is one problem though. Despite Apple's claims that Pages is able to export to a wide range of industry standard formats, and the export options do look impressive, the sad fact is that it just doesn't work. I am always amazed by our willingness to accept software that doesn't work, and that the developers don't seem to realise that it doesn't work until after they have released the software onto an unsuspecting public only too willing to hand over their money to them. I just can't believe that Apple spent all that money and time on developing Pages, and not once did anyone try to export a document into Word or HTML. The exporting process is straightforward enough, but when it came to opening the document in Word, it was a different story. Word struggled bravely, first of all telling me that the document was corrupted in some way, it then tried to recover the document for me, but eventually gave up the ghost and crashed. The same thing happened each time I tried to open an exported template. To be fair, text documents, those that did not include the fancy Apple template formating and pictures worked just fine. Similar difficulties arose when I tried to export into HTML. For some reason, the formating got lost. I'm sure Apple will fix these problems, but why couldn't they have done that before releasing the app.

Another minor irritant is the poor quality of the app icon. It sits in my dock, an indistinct muddy blue blob. It's hard to tell what it is supposed to be.

Having said all that this is another great app from Apple and one which I think I will get a lot of use out of. It's not quite the more straightforward Word replacement that I was hoping for, but it certainly does everything that I want and more.