iWork, Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster | Hacker News Reader

iWork, Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster

betalogue.com

84 pointscharlesism69 comments

Apple "has eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages is intended."

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Nigel Warren Writes:

    "The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn’t because Apple is blind to power users. It’s because they’re willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator."

http://rarebitstudio.com/blog/2013/10/whither-iwork

Meaning that Apple had to reduce features to the minimum available on all three platforms and could not support additional features outside of this scope.

However, for some of the removed features, this clearly doesn't make sense:

- Keyboard Shortcuts for text styles. What's the issue with storing shortcuts in the file format that only work on the Mac Version. It's not like they have any influence on the 'looks' of the file

- Selecting non-contiguous text

- Outline View

- Customizable Toolbar

- Reorganize pages by dragging

- Select all instances of style

All these features have no influence of the actual display of the file in question, but only allow for faster editing within the app. Offering any of these features on the Mac version would not influence the usability or display of the data in the iOS or web version. The only actual reason I can think of to omit these features is that they simply had no more time to work on it and had to release in the current state.

Some of those look like things that might have been cut because of time. While most of them are nice, they're all things which are edge cases for most users or potential users.

Outline view for example - yes it's a desirable feature but most people just open a document and start typing.

Customizing the toolbar is potentially slightly different - that might just be part of Apple's "no need to customize, we've worked out the best way" approach...

There's another part of Apple's announcement that may help explain. Apple touts this release as "completely rewritten". Rewriting a complex app often results in a loss of functionality for no better reason than that things are institutionally forgotten. Invisible UX features like page dragging, keyboard shortcuts, etc. seem especially prone to omission by oversight.

Or iOS versions were forked off some time earlier, heavily modified, and are now being backported to OS X.

Didn't they already re-write these apps?

I love the Stockholmed defenders posting here. Next up, Pages 6 - a piece of paper and a pencil!

"The editing is very intuitive. You just rub the other end of the pencil on the paper - very nice. The motion feels like a tablet."

"There are way more pages of paper the Apple devices, Apple is just skating to the puck here."

"Most people want simpler word processing. Apple has listened to its users - this is so easy a child could do it."

"I prefer Apple's minimalism to a complicated and expensive device. Paper and pencil just works."

"It's quite a bit less expensive, but my friends can see the Apple logo watermark right there in the center so it still fits my trendy Bay Area lifestyle."

You forgot the most important one:

"Apple removing features is what allows it to push forward so much faster than Microsoft"

In the same way that Mail.app has made CRAZY progress since RSS has been kicked out to everyone's applause... sigh

Except that's actually pretty accurate. One of the reasons MS is so slow is because their apps & platforms are so heavy with reverse compatibility.

I think the point is that removing functionality doesn't mean you're going to move faster. Mail.app removed functionality but has received no major new features for years, and is still overall kind of a crappy phone-it-in email app. Almost anything is better than Mail.app today.

I know it sounds plausible, especially considering the ugly hacks that are revealed on The Old New Thing. But I don't think there's ever been any proof, or even good examples of it. Management, friction between departments and time wasted on visual overhauls could easily be bigger factors than a few thousand (or millions) lines of ugly code maintained for backwards compatibility.

Empirically, the iCloud reboot is still meh. iMovie (cleanly rewritten one version ago) is averaging at 3 stars on the Mac App Store, with especially devastating reviews in the German MAS. On the other hand, iOS 7 is moving very fast while being one of the products where Apple cares a lot about backwards compatibility.

They are Apple users, what else would you expect?!

Your parent cleverly made an insightful point that is cutting without offensively stereotyping, and you respond with a piece of jerky snark that is not clever, insightful, or cutting, and which is offensive. In fact, your comment plays almost as well as satire of mindless anti-Apple crusaders as the parent's does as satire of the opposite. If that's how you meant it, then bravo, otherwise, lame.

The Internet history is full of forum entries justifying the actions from Cupertino, regardless whatever they make sense or not.

As for being an anti-Apple crusader, I spent part of my day coding on Mac Book Air.

As the village women used to say "Those that get offended recognised themselves".

It's still a bad comment.

> Meanwhile, Microsoft Word has just become more and more horrible to look at and to use.

This is due, in large part, to Microsoft's institutional inability to remove anything if it might upset a single user. If you want a simple, intuitive interface, you must, from time to time, remove features.

For what it's worth, there are quite a few word processor options for the Mac other than Pages and Word:

  Mellel: http://www.mellel.com/
  Bean: http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
  Nisus Writer: http://nisus.com/pro/
  Write 2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/write-2/id542987253?mt=12

So it's not exactly like Apple has you over a barrel. If you need pro tools, there are pro tools. This kind of bellyaching is annoying to me because there's no way to satisfy someone with this attitude.

N.B. If you don't want to upgrade and are afraid one errant "update all" click will remove your installed copies of iWork '09, you're safe: like the iMovie '08 upgrade, the new iWork apps are installed side-by-side with the old versions. If you update, you can find the old versions in /Applications/iWork '09.

If the iMovie '08-like SxS install is to be the judge of how Apple views the suite, iWork '13 is definitely meant to be an incomplete "reboot" that will mature and gain features back with time. Until then, if you need those features, iWork '09 is still there.

Interestingly, on the iLife side, iMovie '13 is installed side-by-side with iMovie 9, but not iPhoto.

Also note: Pages 5 has a File->Export ... option to export a Pages '09 version of the current file.

So it's possible to get documents out of Pages 5 if you updated inadvertently and converted all your iCloud files, and go back to Pages '09.

Doesn't that save a version with screwed up formatting though? e.g. logo in the headers missing

> but not iPhoto.

I am guessing the photo database only works with versions of iPhoto/Aperture that are as new, or newer, as the app with which they were originally created.

Yep. I'm a heavy Aperture user (~5-6 TB of data at this point). They change the underlying database schema about every other point update. There is no backwards compatibility there.

iWork and Pages 5 are huge regressions for those people who used all the features, and that's unfortunate for them. But for most people they will be upgrades. Most people want/need simpler word processing and office applications, and that's what Apple has given them.

Essentially Apple has started from a clean slate. They have unified the Mac and iOS version. Now they'll be able to add features all over again with subsequent versions.

This is similar to what they did with iMovie '08, FCPX etc etc.

Yeah, Pages 5 just replaced ByWord as my writing app. It's really simple/minimalistic - in a good way for me at least. Both Pages 4 and Word are way too cluttered for my taste. This is the perfect combination for me at least, not too simplistic (like the markdown apps) and not too cluttered (like Word).

http://i.imgur.com/2rT4tP9.png

The interesting thing about FCP X is that people HATED IT (with good reason) when it first came out, but they've since added a lot of really good features according to what I've seen and read.

It's not clear what level of success the improved FCP X has had in bringing back former FCP 7 users to the fold. A lot of users moved to Avid or Adobe Premiere, which both have a workflow that is much closer to FCP 7, and the vendors made major efforts to attract FCP users that were on the fence.

Anecdotally, I know a film school where they used to teach on both Avid and FCP. When FCP X came out, they abandoned the use of FCP in classes entirely because it didn't do the things they needed to teach anymore. Now that they've gone through the pain of restructuring the classes, they're not going to take another look at FCP X any time soon.

That's true, it takes a lot to bring back people after burning them.

With desktop computers slowly shifting to make a place for tablets, Apple is skating to the puck:

This feels like the reset Apple did with iMovie a few years back:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=640314

Apple made iMovie easier [1], and ultimately reduced the price of Final Cut Pro to $300, which is in the range of high-end amateurs or power users.

In this case, though, I don't think they care about the power user, because the threat/opportunity is down market in Google Docs. I think they are simplifying the product to reach a lot more people, rather than retain the loyalty of a small group of users who use Pages as a full-blown word processor. I.e., they want to convert a percentage of their iOS users to Pages.

Apple says they have sold 600 million iOS devices [2]. If you assume 300 of those devices are active, and Apple coverts 3% of those users, they have 9M new Pages users. If those iOS users happen to use the Mac version of Pages, even better. But they want to convert people away from Android/Google Docs as much as they want to shift people away from Windows/Microsoft Word.

[1] "Easier" is subjective, but as a long-time user of iMovie, _I_ found it easier, so I'll use that term here.

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/10/4415258/apple-announces-60...

In other words, they're aiming for the market of people who don't want to pay for a word processor.

(But who do want nice hardware.)

They're aiming for a market that is willing to pay $300 to $600 for a iPad, and a free word processor sweetens the deal a bit. The fact that you can access your docs on your mac or in browser (also for free) is nice sweetener, too.

> Apple is skating to the puck

Given the rest of your comment, I think you meant ‘Apple is skating to where the puck is going to be’.

No, I think the puck is already at two of the three platforms they targeted with the new release: web and desktop. I think mobile/tablets isn't there yet, but that is changing, too. Microsoft isn't getting much traction yet, but they're moving there, too.

Hmm, I think you don’t really understand the Gretzky quote “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” and how it’s used in this context.

If you skate to where the puck is now, you’re just following others, stuck in old ways, and you’ll always at a competitive disadvantage (it takes time to skate – if you skate to where the puck is now, you’ll never be able to hit it.) If you’re skating to where the puck is going to be (when you get there), you’re taking the lead, you’re anticipating change acting before it happens.

Writers don't compose on a tablet. No one who does any significant amount of writing does so on a tablet. They use keyboards. A word processor is a tool for writing. It should optimize for the input devices used by writers.

A lot of people use keyboards with their iPad.

A lot of people do, but not a lot of professional writers do.

If I found myself going through all this work to set up applescripts and whatnot, I would just use LaTeX. It's the correct tool for people that want complete control over their document formatting. I actually like iWork 5 MORE now, precisely because it does what it sets out to do even better than before - it's a basic text editor that creates fantastic looking layouts. You know, for when I don't want or need to fire up LaTeX.

I respectfully disagree that LaTeX is "the correct tool for people that want complete control over their document formatting" - in my view, LaTeX is for when you don't want to think about formatting at all - because it automatically formats things.

Something like Adobe InDesign is for when you want complete control over your document's formatting. (InDesign is actually a quite good word processor.)

I see what you're saying, but I personally use LaTeX for fine control of layout; I've spent a while writing a bunch of custom style docs that are tweaked out to my exact specification. It seems like this is what the author is trying to do with his applescripts, which was my point.

Good point about InDesign, though, if you want to do this kind of layout manually in a graphical environment. It's powerful software indeed.

I was wondering when InDesign would come up in this thread. It is completely badass. It has layout/design power in spades. If you want to spit out an invoice or write a paper for school, use Numbers or Word. If you want to professionally layout an annual report, illustrated book or magazine (think Motor Trend, Cosmopolitan, or The Economist) you do it with InDesign. Most of those magazines likely use InDesign for in house layout.

On a side note: InDesign is a pretty powerful wire framing tool for web and app development because of it's robust support for styles, page templates, and linked graphic resources. Like much Adobe software, you can spend a lifetime mastering it.

Indesign is also minimum $240 per year.

I would think if you were a professional writer of a technical stripe, DocBook or some TeX variant would be the appropriate choice.

This is very bad. I write programs that use the scriptability of Pages to assist people in writing. The users often have writing and reading problems and our programs aid the user in the writing process. The fact the your program can not touch any text in the document (Paragraphs, words, characters) is a real showstopper for us. It is hard to recommend Pages for those users (And yes, we have a system wide spelling checker available trough the usual means).

Here is hoping that Apple will fix this. That is bring back the functionality in the scriptable API.

"We Mac power users have been complaining about the “dumbing down” trend in computing that the mobile era has ushered in. Now it’s definitely come to hurt us in a big way. It’s as if the entire iWork team of engineers has been replaced by iOS specialists with little or no interest in the needs of “prosumers” and the like."

- It just Works™

It seems like they're positioning it more as a Google Docs alternative than a MS Office alternative (note the Docs-esque collaborative tools), which is arguably the right way to go; MS Office is so entrenched in many places as to be unassailable.

That's progress, son...

I prefer Apples minimalism to Microsofts bloaterism (ie. Word), and their strong commitment to releasing working software.

And your beloved features will probably be back in the next update or two...

They have removed the ability to import styles. I went back to the old version right away.

"My weird way of doing things broke, I don't like it."

I noticed that Pages 5 uses a new weird file format, it is a bundle again (not a zipped one like in Pages 4), in this folder is a zip archive which includes a bundle again.

I really wonder comes up with those formats and ideas. You almost wished that Apple had made ooXML the standard file format for Pages 5.

Maybe they could release Pages Pro for the folks that actually care about scripting the hell out of things. The average user doesn't just like the average home movie editor does't care about multicamera support or SMTE time codes.

That would increase support costs even more than just maintaining AppleScript support within Pages. It's not like AppleScript support hurts casual users - it's an absolutely invisible feature.

Surely if you're that deep into the styling of your documents, up to a point where various AppleScripts are being called to help you be productive; you might be better off using Latex?

Mac users should better try iTeX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKaI78K_rgA

I updated to Pages 5.0 and still have Pages '09. I can use both.

There is a very nice book that dedicates a chapter to analyze Final Cut Pro X, which Apple removed features used by power users. The book is "Why we Fail. Learning from Experience Design Failures" http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/why-we-fail/ It is a very good read.

History repeats itself.

Look at Final Cut Pro X again. All the features people complained about being missing are back in now.

I don't use Pages everyday, but I can't see what the fuss is all about. Besides missing AppleScript compatibility (which is a shame, it's one of the coolest things about OSX) every feature I have ever used seems to be there, and I much prefer toolbars contained within the application window instead of floating around.

Apple could have avoided some of the problems by continuing the strategy they've adopted with their other apps: Aperture <-> iPhoto, Final Cut <-> iMovie, Logic <-> Garageband - so Pages Pro <-> iPages?

Pages <-> TextEdit

Both are free, though.

I haven't installed the update yet, but I read that the old versions are kept around. Is that true? If it is, the statement about this being a baseline release to build upon seems to be correct

This is surprising since the case is very different in Keynote. As someone who comfortably classes themselves as a "power user" of Keynote, the latest update is a very welcome addition.

Not all self-described power users are happy: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/10/when-free-co...

What the heck is going on with TextEdit? Every time i start it it asks me to upload stuff to iCloud - can't find a way past this.

If you only use iCloud for calendar, contacts etc., you can disable Documents & Data in the iCloud preferences pane. That will skip all the iCloud dialogs in TextEdit, Pages etc., and revert to 10.6 behaviour.

It's the era of the deletionist, from wikipedia, via apple to gnome.

No minimalism. Simply, Apple is unifying 3 platforms: mac, ios, and web. The application limits are the limitations of the weaker platform. You are playing with a nice HTML5 toy (NSA smiles).

Pierre (post author) is an interesting guy, and has been through some seriously tough stuff (brain surgery), but I just can't read his posts any more - he never has anything positive to say! BTW get well soon PI should you see this.

He seems grumpy as usual. And not without point, Apple is well known for their flatland aesthetics.

He is great to have as a user of your software. He sends excellent bug reports and thoughtful features requests and has a great eye for detail.

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