I wonder how many people have bought Macs over the years because of Pages and iWork? Probably quite a few. Getting an office suite for free looks mighty attractive next to Microsoft Office. OK, not as attractive now as it used to be, but there once was quite a large gap between the $9.99 Mac apps and Office, which ran in the hundreds of dollars. I have a mac as well as iPads, and I want to like Pages, I really do, but Apple makes it so hard.
Pages (for the Mac) was first released in 2005, and hit the iPad in 2010. I was there on Day One for that. Early on in the iPad’s existence, it was the most feature-packed word-processor you could get, and it was quite the showpiece for Apple. It was very visually-based, designed from the ground up for a touch interface, and was really beautiful. It was as much a desktop publishing system as a word-processor.
…And they haven’t done much with it since.
They’ve updated the user interface to match Mavericks and later Yosemite. They removed quite a few features when they made the switch, and still haven’t replaced all of them. They did the same thing with Garageband, and don’t get me started on iPhoto. I still don’t understand that.
But sticking to just the iOS version for iPad and iPhone, it’s still a pretty good solution for most people. It really wants you to use iCloud for document storage. I’m of mixed opinion on iCloud, and I’ll talk about that another time, but I don’t currently use it much. You can create documents in Pages and export them to Pages’ own format, PDF, Word, or even ePub, but nothing else. Once you’ve exported your document, in say, Word format, you have the choice to open the file in Word, assuming you have that app on your iPad. So you can get your documents out of Pages easily enough. Importing is also pretty easy.
Once of the best features of word is the extended keyboard. I think more apps should make use of this feature. More and more of them are doing it, but for years, Pages was the best at this. Above the on-screen keyboard is a line of extra keys that work with fonts, tabs, alignment, formatting, justification, and other features. This is nice, and it’s a lot faster than dealing with the pull-down menus at the top of the screen.
It’s a pretty full-featured word-processor. It does track changes for editing, you can password-protect documents, it’s got find & replace, easy-to-use tables, and lots of rulers, grids, and layout helpers. It’s also really nice that almots all features sync between the Mac and the iPad/iPhone. So why don’t I use it anymore?
One reason: I want to be able to use my documents in the future. When Apple made the latest batch of changes to Pages, they removed the ability to open documents from Pages ’09. That was a software version less than three years old at the time. Can you imagine what it would be like to not be able to access files written three years ago? If you are using Microsoft Word or some flavor of text-based file, then that’s no problem. There are zillions of programs that can read those more-or-less common formats. But Apple Pages is the only software available to read files created by Apple Pages. If Apple Pages stops supporting its own file format, what else is there to do? Nothing.
I recently had a situation where I wanted to access the text of a series of newsletter I wrote back in 2008. I was smart, or so I thought. I published those newsletters in PDF format but was very careful to keep the original Pages source files in case I ever needed them again. In late 2014, I tried to load the files and couldn’t. It kept saying I needed Pages ’09 to open the files. How do you get a copy of Pages ’09 in 2014? Answer: You don’t.
I ended up sending my documents through Zamzar.com, a file conversion site. I have nothing particularly against Zamzar, but I’m very glad these documents didn’t have anything private or sensitive in them. Zamzar took the Pages documents and emailed me Word versions of the documents. It worked fine, and I’m relieved I was able to solve the problem, but I’m also not likely to fall into that trap again.
This is one reason that I’ve been advocating text-based files and Markdown. It’s just text; something will always be available to read the files.
You might say Apple wouldn’t make that mistake again. Not like the time they removed all Podcasting support from Garageband, or when they discontinued both iPhoto and Aperture without having any kind of migration path.
I love Apple hardware, but to be honest, their software kind of scares me.
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