Status-Q

I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Pages word processor for less than an hour, but so far, it’s very nice!

It has opened every Word document I threw at it, including some fairly complex ones, and preserved formatting and underlying structure to a greater degree than I remember seeing in any other Word processor. The docs I’ve tried exporting in Word format and opening in Word have come across beautifully.

The templates supplied are beautiful and the overall template system is very simple and works well; it’s very easy to create your own templates and the ‘placeholder text’ concept is efficient and easy to understand.

I like the fact that the underlying document format is a package (a directory) containing XML files and any images, rather like OpenOffice’s. I was able to unzip the XML within a Pages document, change some text, re-zip it and open it again in Pages – everything worked fine. Pages can even produce quite reasonably HTML, though it isn’t really designed with this as an emphasis.

There are, of course, lots of features that Word has and that Pages doesn’t, but I consider myself to use quite a few more features than the average user, and I haven’t yet seen many things that I would miss. I certainly appreciate the fact that I can get it with its Powerpoint-like companion for only UKP 49; less than a quarter of the price of Word alone. It does like a pretty speedy machine, though; users of older Macs may find it rather sluggish.

At the very least, it’s a good option for somebody not sure whether they want to splash out on Microsoft’s offering. I’d certainly recommend it for anybody who isn’t sure they need Word. The fact that Word has crashed numerous times in the last few days for me makes me more receptive to alternatives. And, of course, Pages is much nicer to look at….

Follow-up: My friend Hap has pointed out the missing feature most likely to be a problem for us when it comes to corporate use: the lack of a ‘track changes’ facility. If this, or similar features like automatic cross-referencing, are likely to be something you need, then you may need to stick with Word. If you don’t like or can’t afford Word, then NeoOffice/J, the Mac version of OpenOffice, is becoming really quite good. Not so pretty, though! I’d still rather use Pages for most things.

From an article by Barb Dybwad: Gaining my religion: seeing the light of Mac:

Evans lists the primary strengths of the Macintosh computer as being usability and good looks. Both are absolutely true and yet, both are also so often used as arguments *against* the Mac, which is portrayed as losing a war in which the only salient metric is functionality. Usability and ‘style’ are seen as secondary considerations when in the market for a personal computer – as if packing more and more difficult to use features into a dull, utilitarian box is the only way to the top of the heap.
This is absolute hogwash, as the success of the iPod clearly demonstrates.

So, the Mac Mini is out. The line is that Apple can make it smaller and better than most PCs because they make the whole thing:

From $499. (Costs about a third more if you buy it in the UK.) Very cool. This and a few other tasty new things at Apple’s site.

Ron Avitzur’s story of how he kept working at Apple when he was no longer working for Apple. [Thanks to Seb Wills for the link]

There was some discussion on Mac OS X hints in recent months on how to export your Apple Address Book as comma-separated values for importing into things like Thunderbird.

I did some tweaks to Sean’s AddressBookToCSV script, and have since tweaked it a bit more. You can grab my current version here:
AB2CSV.zip

I’ve written before about one of my favourite features of Apple Mail – the ability to select multiple mailboxes at once and see a merged list of messages which you can sort, search etc. If I’m looking for all my correspondence on a particular subject or with a particular person, I’ll often select all my (6) inboxes, sent mail boxes, and probably a few archives as well, and then type into the search box. I’ve never seen this merging of mailboxes work so well on another mail viewer; it’s the main thing I miss when using the otherwise excellent Thunderbird.

Once you’re working within some search query or other particular view of your mail, though, how do you get back to your normal view to make a quick check on something else without losing your current setup? It’s easy, I’ve just realised. On the File menu there’s a ‘New Viewer Window’ option. This gives you a duplicate of the main window in which you can work completely independently, so you can pop up a new window for a particular search, have separate windows for working in different email accounts etc.

[Original Link] Mac techies interested in the ‘Spotlight’ search technology that’s coming up in Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, should have a look at this article.

I like this example. Backup all the files on your system containing the word ‘Tiger’:

for i in `mdfind Tiger`
do
    cp $i /Volumes/Backup/$i
done

[Original Link]

Just watched the Quicktime feed of Steve Jobs doing the iPod Photo launch, with the aid of U2. I have to take my hat off to Apple – I’m biased by my enthusiasm for their technology, but even without that I can think of few companies with their marketing and branding skills.

I’ve sat through plenty of roadshows and product launches in my life, and, in general, I detest them. So why would I voluntarily give up an hour of my weekend to watch a CEO telling me about his latest product? If you need to ask that, I suggest you watch one. This latest isn’t their slickest, and Steve Jobs, though on good form, is perhaps a little below his normal par, which is understandable after his recent major surgery. But there’s still no other company that comes close.

Get a good connection, expand your Quicktime window to a good size, sit back and enjoy. And remember that it’s Apple technology that you’re using to view the stream as well….

[Original Link] Here’s a hint I found quite useful. On the Powerbook, the function keys, by default, do other things like changing the brightness of the display or turning numlock on and off. To make them operate as function keys, you have to press ‘fn’ at the same time. If, like me, you use them more as function keys (for exposé etc), you can invert this behaviour in the Keyboard section of System Preferences.