Spreading the aloha of Macintosh, Hawaiian music and island culture from the sunset side of Haleakala volcano on the wonderful island of Maui

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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Is Apple's 'Pages' program a Word killer? - part two Apple's 'Pages' opens Word and chews on Quark link to part one It's unfortunate that the most necessary feature of Pages is it's ability to easily open and save Microsoft Word files. Ease of use and features should top the list. But, when some poor drone sends you an email attachment with the dreaded '.doc' suffix that you can't open, you now have a choice. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office just to read a document someone else sent you, or dealing with all the incompatibilities previously mentioned, you simply drag the attachment.doc on to the Pages icon. It will open automatically and then you can read, edit and save as if you owned the original Word program. This is done with a $75 piece of software! In fact, Pages is more compatible - it works with more versions - than MS Word itself. AppleWorks does this too, but that ripe old app required that you choose the format each time you save your document, while Pages just does it. Your drone friends won't even know that you don't have a PC, viruses, or spyware and Microsoft doesn't have any of your money. Another neat, but currently flawed feature is that Pages will convert your document into HTML code for use in a website. The resultant HTML is pretty messy - complex layouts get blown to pieces - but it's a lot better than writing code directly in HTML - an effort akin to building a Harley-Davidson out of toothpicks and duct tape. So the first great feature is Word & HTML compatibility. The next concerns 'pdf'. It's a Quark Killer Too! I was a very early adapter of Quark's ubiquitous 'Xpress' program. Having assembled ad layouts with a waxer, Xacto knife and long hours at the drawing board, even a germinal desktop publishing program such as MacPublisher was a dream come true. Aldus PageMaker legitimized the DTP product category and held sway until Quark 'took over'. For a while there was a DTP program under every rock, most of which sucked and died quietly. Others like MultiAd Creator and RagTime found niches to hide in and thrive, but eventually Quark ate all the little fishes and left the DTP category vacant below the $700 level. This lack of mid-range lauyout programs lead to desperate people actually trying to layout newsletters or ads with MSWord, or the gawd-awful MS Publisher. Traffic in pirated copies of Quark or PageMaker grew along with incompatibilities and system crashes caused by ancient software that users could not afford to upgrade. In time, Quark got paranoid and PageMaker became irrelevant because the bottom line in desktop publishing was ultimately defined not by the software you had, but by the program your print shop used. If you brought 'Ducky Insta Print" an AppleWorks file, you were usually shit out of luck - anything less than Quark 3.X never got to press. Finally Quark's greed and paranoia got so bad that even the ink on paper guys refused to play. The cost of putting Xpress on every workstation at a print shop became prohibitive, so most stuck with versions 3.5 or 4 on OS9. Upgrading not only cost an arm below the elbow, but just registering the program or getting tech support was a major pain in the okole. Calling Quark for help ranks just below calling Microsoft, Quicken or Dick Cheney. While enlightened print shop owners, even Kinko's, chose to support Adobe pdf instead of Xpress, Quark was having trouble exporting a pdf that printed correctly. Adobe at last swooped in with InDesign, a very good DTP program that produces excellent pdf files that you can take right to press. At last someone has challenged Quark's dominance on the high end. So while Quark drowns in money but begins to fade in the real world, a huge hole has opened up just where a reasonably-priced layout program should be. We need something that is cheap, contains basic features such as type control, text-wrap around graphics, style sheets and above all the ability to export the final job as a valid .pdf file a printer can use. To compete for mind-share among artists the app also has to be elegant, brilliant to use and supported by a company with deep pockets. Hmm? "The date is 2005, and Quark wants it all..." to be continued... 9:44:43 AM    comment []