Even though I have assembled quite a lot of information, questions and quirks about Apples word processor Pages, it is not a program I feel particularly connected with. It is a word processor from Apple. It does what it should do - some of the time. It does some things elegantly and many things not at all. It still after eight years has some pretty big limitations, like poor support for Arabic and Hebrew.
Every now and then I try to find a better tool, and often I find myself using MS Word or TextEdit for local files.
As time has gone on, more and more people talk about the cloud, and one would think that the big software giants of today had figured out how to make it work properly. I decided to compare Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive and iCloud, thinking that anyone of them probably will be fine for me. It turned out that none of them has made the cloud work properly yet, but the one with least limitations was Apple's Pages.
What I want seems simple enough. I want to edit text. Not pictures. Not fancy layout. Not tables or embedded movies. I do not need collaboration, revisions, comments or versions. Just text. I want to edit the text:
- on a Mac.
- on a Windows PC.
- on a tablet.
- on a phone.
- in a browser.
- off line.
- on line with synchronisation with a cloud.
Skydrive
Microsoft Skydrive is something that is so close but not at all there. To use Skydrive on a Mac, you download an application called Skydrive from Microsoft. It is free. You also buy MS Office, which is not at all free. To use Skydrive to edit texts on your Android or iOS phone, you need to sign up to Microsoft Office 365, which costs $10 a month. On the paper, Office 365 is a good deal. You get the latest version of Office for 5 computers, Macs or PCs, and you can use it with your phone. However, if you already have MS Office, $10 a month is quite expensive for something Apple and Google give you for free. I heard that one can edit Office files without problems on a Windows phone, but that is not the phone I have.
And then there are the bugs.
I got some problems with Skydrive and followed a link in Skydrive for Mac, which recommended me to download Skydrive for PC to my Mac. Skydrive for PC is not compatible with Windows XP, so it would not work even on my Windows machine, and it is of course even less compatible with Mac OS X. I found a link to Skydrive for Mac and reinstalled the latest version. The program then hang itself in an infinite loop, where it asked me if I wanted to restart it over and over again. Even restarting my Mac did not help. When I finally managed to clean up the installation enough to make Skydrive start, it refused to synchronise, which is its main purpose. It showed the sync symbol for five minutes, proudly explaining that it was uploading a 36k document. Once it was done, I verified the synchronisation, and it had failed.
The two main problems with Skydrive are:
1. It is pricy.
2. It is unusable.
But I give it that the web interface to edit documents is decent and it plays reasonably well with a local copy of Word, if you are connected to the internet.
Google Drive
Google Drive, which used to be called Google Docs was one of the first major cloud office suits. It works well on line, it is a good way to share a document between several connected devices.
My problem with Google Drive is off line editing. I can edit documents using my iPhone when it is connected, but when I am abroad without roaming, when I am in an airplane, or when I have not paid my internet provider fee, I am stuck. I can read documents off line, but I cannot edit them.
Using Google Drive for PC or Mac is slightly better. One can edit documents when one is not connected. One can even create new ones. However, one cannot export them to other formats when one is off line, so if you want to make a modification using some feature in MS Word, you have to first find an internet connection.
iCloud
A few years ago, I would not have bet much on Pages being a major part of my text editing life, and I would not have bet on Apple being able to do anything properly in the cloud.
However, it turns out that Pages for iOS and Pages for Mac both save files locally and sync them with iCloud. I can create a document on my disconnected iPad, connect my iPad and sync and update the document on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac when I get home. I can even use a browser and update it on a PC (but without any local storage). That's basically all I need.
Conclusion
My very personal conclusion which applies to me, is that iCloud wins. If I had to limit myself to one cloud, it would be iCloud. If I can use two clouds, I would use iCloud and Google Drive. If I can use three, I would use iCloud and Google Drive and nothing more.
That is the state of today. I do not necessarily recommend you to use iCloud, because your needs may be different from mine. Regardless of what anyone uses today, I hope Google, Apple and Microsoft will all improve in the future. Even Skydrive has potential if Microsoft just decides to fix its bugs and release it properly to non-Windows users.
That is my second wish. That iCloud shall work fine on Android and Windows and Linux. That Skydrive shall work on Android and iOS and that Google Drive will get decent support for off line editing on all platforms.
Once that is done, perhaps the different systems can start working with each other instead of isolated in their own little clouds up in the blue.
