TechPaladin Printing

Dueling office suites, lovable software

A funny thing happened yesterday: I found myself wishing for an opportunity to use Pages, a part of Apple’s iWork suite I recently bought. Pages is not a game. It’s not a non-linear video editor, a graphics manipulation application, or a 3D modeler. It’s a simple word processor, designed to aid in the writing and editing of blocks of letters and words. Word processors are not fun, nor have they ever been in the global history of all computing. Word processors are simply a means to produce whatever lettered end you wish to arrive at. While the same can be said of any type of creative software, such as Photoshop or Final Cut or modo, these applications tend to have dedicated and loyal users who are fanatical about their software and will defend their choice if asked to compare it to comparable product. Microsoft Word has never had this loyal fanbase.

As Word is the program probably 100% of all computer users believe they need for the task of penning their thoughts, the overall enthusiasm of its most enthusiastic users is drowned out by the ones who couldn’t give a damn about what makes Word special because they don’t know what the alternatives are. Since the product was commoditized and everyone uses it, most people use it not out of choice but out of perceived necessity.

Despite that, the latest version is absolutely awesome. Earlier this year, I actually found myself infatuated with the windows version of Microsoft’s venerable and bloated office suite because it was so good! Office was and is the testing ground for an experimental interface convention, something called the Ribbon, which is essentially is nothing more than a context-sensitive bar of labeled icons, giving access to Word’s functions. The Ribbon completely replaces the menu bar, and is aimed at increasing the discoverability of Word’s monstrous feature set. To that aim, it succeeds fantastically, and it truly creates one single, easy-to-use access point for all the functions of an entire application! I must admit that I was quite in awe of what I perceived to be the user interface genius behind the idea. Why doesn’t Apple adopt this obviously superior convention? I wondered.

Well, with iWork ’08, they did. Only, in true Apple fashion, they distilled it to its core genius and left out all the bloat and cruft. Pages’ context-sensitive bar is barely 15 pixels high, and contains all common text and graphics operations, depending on what’s selected, compared to Office’s Ribbon, which takes up 135 and tries to do everything. Rather than throwing everything there and doing in the menu bar, Apple opted to respect users’ existing knowledge and augment the menu bar and toolbar with the new context-sensitive format bar, and actually achieves the holy grail of putting common features a click away while preserving ease of access to advanced ones while not treading on existing users’ expertise. Jackpot!

Pages also includes a host of entirely new features, too. First of all, it’s got Word-compatible track changes–a must for heavy collaboration and exchange of ideas. As usual, Apple implemented the feature in a surprisingly pleasing, elegant, attractive manner, and finally exposes an obvious way to temporarily stop tracking changes without turning the whole darn system off:

  Finally!

Then there’s Instant Alpha, which is an easy way to extract part of an image from its background. But the important part isn’t that it’s easy, but that it’s super-easy. The procedure is practically instantaneous and results in beautiful, Photoshop-defying results in probably under 1/20th of the time it would take using any existing procedure. Here’s an example image I grabbed off Google real fast:

And here’s what I managed after scarcely 20 seconds of effort in Pages using Instant Alpha:

Sure, if I had taken 10 minutes to do it in Photoshop, I probably could have achieved a slightly cleaner result. Maybe a substantially cleaner one. But are those 9 minutes and 40 seconds worth it for an extra 5 to 10 percent of quality? For most people, the answer is no, and the fact that Pages allows a result that’s 90% as good in less than of 1% the time is commendable and astonishing. Just for fun, Pages also lifts the image manipulation panel straight from iPhoto, making it a powerful image editor as well.

That’s not all, though. They also threw in the ability to natively open, edit, and save the new Office 2007 files, a feat that Microsoft itself hasn’t yet accomplished in its own Office suite. That’s right, Microsoft hasn’t managed to build read/write capability for a file format it invented into a piece of software it wrote, and now Apple comes along and does it just to embarrass them. Snicker.

Pages is also full of nifty little timesavers, like the ability to look a word up in Google or Wikipedia with one click and insert hyperlinks from your existing bookmark library. They also threw in grammar checking for the hell of it, and it’s about as good as Word’s – which is to say pretty pathetic. It must be hard to program a good grammar checker, but at least the feature’s there to be improved in the future. Basically, Pages 08 is a major upgrade in practically every way.

All this raw functionality coupled with lightness and quickness and a killer interface makes Pages an absolute joy to use. And that’s why I wanted to use it. Not because I felt the need to write, or wanted to edit some document I had created, but I wanted to use it because Pages is so enjoyable that I felt the concrete desire to interact with it.

Kevin Hoffman, a prominent Windows programmer, once referred to his time using Apple software thusly: “I have never before encountered a situation where I missed the visceral experience of a tool more than its raw feature set.”

What I felt this morning was beyond that; not only was I missing the visceral experience of using Pages, but I was actively trying to generate reasons to use it when none actually existed.

I have Never before encountered a situation where I wished for some work to do simply so I could have the experience of using my favored tool to complete it.

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