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• Friday, August 17, 2007 12:27 PM

  Professional writer disagrees.

  I write for a living, and Pages quite literally has saved my sanity (if any wordsmith can be said to be sane...) I've worked with every wordprocessing suite that will run on my machines, from Office 98 on both platforms (a torture chamber worthy of Dante) to Nissus Writer, Mellel, Mariner Write (all acceptable, all with major flaws), to Write Room (handy for blocking out the world, but featureless) through to Pages. And the MS side is not neglected... in fact it was Office 2000 and XP that drove me to Macs in the first place. (What would you do if your computer mangled a 60,000 word thesis... and the backups?)

  Mossburg probably hasn't used Pages enough to understand it, and if my own experience in transition is any indicator, it takes weeks of constant use to really adapt one's own thinking processes to a piece of software because the fact is that we are the adaptable ones, not the code. Animism aside, no software is flexible enough to adapt to the myriad needs and whims of 10,000 highly varied users. Despite all the claims, transitioning platforms or products is not painless; one must relearn keyboard short-cuts, unlearn certain behaviors, and in general foam a bit at the mouth until the day it clicks. Pages was no different, but once I learned the software, I realized it was far more flexible than Word ever dreamt of being. For example, I can write a file in Pages, transform it to HTML and post in about an hour, and without having to slog through the HTML checking for errors. The generated code is nearly always perfect and beautifully WYSIWYG. Word... well, there's a reason I learned HMTL in the first place... It handles tables, images, pagination, layout... InDesign is a bit sturdier, but then again, InDesign is a $1000 product, and at least on the Mac side of the house, not terribly stable.

  It's also a remarkably stable piece of software unhampered by the bloat that comes from consuming several hundred contract coders. I have never, in three years of using it, had a crash. I have never lost data. That XML backbone works, and well over two million words later, that means a lot to me. I will admit that the only thing that I miss about Word is the ability, after spellcheck, for Word to tell me what grade level the piece measures; but that's such a limited feature that I can live.

  Is it a perfect piece of software? Of course not; there's no such thing. But one of Mossberg's other critiques - that it doesn't integrate with Outlook?? Thank the bloody software gods!!! Outlook is responsible for more time wastage and spam than Solitaire and the Nigerian Scam combined. It does integrate perfectly with Mail, and since Mail is integrated with ICal, it has the same power, but with less risk.

  I will admit that I rarely use Keynote; I suspected that presentation software sucked brains dry long before the proof was published so I avoid situations where slides are necessary. And I will admit that I am excited about Numbers, since Open Office's spreadsheet program is adequate, but neither exciting nor especially intuitive. But I'm very happy that Apple's developed something functional that hits all three sides of the business software world. Now if only they'd release a FileMaker Light type product, we'd be golden.

  —CZEdwards Read CZEdwards's other letters
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