There was some consternation at Macworld in San Francisco January 2007, as Steve Jobs did not present any computer updates - no new Macbooks, no news about MacOS X and no new versions of iLife and iWork.
This clearly does not mean that Apple will stop producing computers and MacOS X. The new iPhone runs MacOS X after all, and Apple has a huge investment in computers and software.
It seems Steve simply thought this was not the place for that kind of announcements.
But regardless of that, it may be good to be skeptical about updates to iWork and Pages.
Apple is unlikely to ever position Pages as a business word processor. To fullfil the needs of all businesses is a daunting task, and even MS Word does not do everything on its own. Microsoft has been investing in Word for more than 20 years, and it still is not perfect.
The two main purposes of Pages are likely to be
1. to make sure there is a reasonably priced Apple branded word processor for people who want one.
2. to show off Apple's technology - like advanced typography, graphics and inclusion of media in text documents and so on.
Point 1 is solved. There is nothing more to be done there. Pages works - it creates documents and saves them. There are quirks in Pages. There are things that could be added to satisfy some users or markets, but for most users it does most of the things we want.
The application AppleWorks/ClarisWorks is arguably one of the greatest applications ever. When I started using it in the beginning of the nineties, I said to myself "it only needs so little extra development to be perfect". But Apple never added that extra development. They never added an efficient index to the database and they never made it as easy to enter dates in a spreadsheet, as it is in MS Excel. And they never added unicode support.
It looks easy to do it, but it would cost Apple a lot and it would not bring a lot of additional revenue. So they did not do it.
However, point 2 is only solved for MacOS X 10.4 - not for upcoming versions. It is likely that MacOS X 10.5 will include new graphical and typographical features, which Pages can use, if it is updated. For that reason, it is likely that there will be new versions of iWork.
But do not expect big expensive development dedicated to Pages. If it can be reused in other applications, the OS will get it. If not, it will probably not be implemented.
The text above was written before iWork '08 came out in August 2007. It is still largely valid.
2 comments:
An upgrade to iWork exists and I cannot say anything more without breaking the terms of my NDA. As you say, Jobs and Co had a particular idea in mind with the keynote Thursday and the Macintosh wasn't part of that theme.
What starts worrying me is the divergence between Pages and TextEdit. Only TextEdit handles tables in RTF files. Only TextEdit exports odt and docx formats. TextEdit handles some OpenType glyphs that Pages does not handle. Only TextEdit has subpixel font rendering. TextEdit has kerning while Pages has tracking. If the two programs cannot share code to handle this kind of things, about twice as much development needs to go into the programs. And it is not certain that Apple is willing to invest as much resources as is needed.
Pages risks getting into a vegetative mode, like AppleWorks, which was a fabulous application in its first reincarnation, but then failed to evolve as much as it should.
Pages is still evolving, but is it evolving as much and as quickly as we would like?
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