Status-Q

(Just to maintain a bit of balance after the last posting…)

My Mac let me down in public today. It was only a minor flaw, but it was notable because it’s the first time I can remember such an incident in my three or four years of using Macs.

I was about to give a talk, and had been looking forward to using the new features of Apple’s Keynote 2 presentation software. It has this nice ‘Presenter Screen’ on the built-in display which can show you, amongst other things, the currently displayed slide, the next slide (or the result of the next animation), your notes, and a timer, while your main presentation is shown on the second screen or projector. You can customize this screen layout, and it’s very cute.

Everything was set up and ready to roll a couple of minutes before the talk, when I made the mistake of trying to see if the projector would do a higher resolution. It wouldn’t, but it didn’t tell the Mac that, so it displayed a blue screen while my Mac happily carried on thinking it was driving the projector as its primary display. And unfortunately, when it thinks the display is working OK, then the settings dialog for the display pops up on that display, so I couldn’t change the projector settings back. (You see, it was really the fault of the projector!) What I could do was set the screens into ‘mirroring mode’, meaning that both displays showed the same thing, but whenever I set it back to dual-screen mode, the Mac helpfully restored my previous display settings (a feature I normally love), so giving me the blue screen again. There was no network access, so I couldn’t go the dearly beloved macosxhints.com site and find out how to fix it.

I’d kept the audience waiting long enough, so I had to use it in mirroring mode, which meant I didn’t get the cool Presenter Display. This meant that I didn’t have my notes (and I don’t believe in putting much text on my slides). Nor did I know which slide was coming next, because I’d reordered some of them just before starting. I had no printout of the notes or slides. Things didn’t flow quite as smoothly as they might have done!

Ironically, I think the answer might have simply been to reboot. I so rarely need to reboot my Mac that I didn’t even think of it, or assumed that it would restore the previous settings. But I have read of other Mac users who have been stuck in exactly the same way and fixed it by restarting. It’s what I would have tried first on a Windows machine. But the moral of the story is never to place too much faith in any technology. Even if it’s a Mac.

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.