

iWork, Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster - charlesism
http://www.betalogue.com/2013/10/24/pages-5-disaster/
Apple &quot;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.&quot;
======
terhechte
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](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.

~~~
spoondan
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.

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

------
cognivore
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."

~~~
gurkendoktor
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_

~~~
eitally
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

------
fusiongyro
> 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.

------
itafroma
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.

~~~
cstross
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.

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

------
Synaesthesia
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.

~~~
nnnnni
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.

~~~
pavlov
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.

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

------
wiremine
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](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...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/10/4415258/apple-
announces-600-million-ios-devices-sold)

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

~~~
wiremine
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.

------
daughart
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.

~~~
AnthonBerg
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.)

~~~
wmeredith
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.

------
bjorn_ragnar
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.

------
pearjuice
"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™

------
rsynnott
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.

------
woof
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...

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

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

------
tehabe
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.

------
briandear
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.

~~~
gurkendoktor
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.

------
_s
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?

~~~
unlogic
Mac users should better try iTeX:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKaI78K_rgA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKaI78K_rgA)

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

------
neves
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/](http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/why-we-fail/) It is a very good read.

History repeats itself.

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

------
ricardobeat
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.

------
cormullion
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?

~~~
charlesism
Pages <-> TextEdit

~~~
cdcarter
Both are free, though.

------
emehrkay
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

------
nthnclrk
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.

~~~
easyfrag
Not all self-described power users are happy:
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/10/when-free-
co...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/10/when-free-collides-
with-powerful.html)

------
janlukacs
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.

~~~
gurkendoktor
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.

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

------
sylehc
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).

------
piqufoh
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.

~~~
anon1385
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.

