Apple Pages and its shortcomings
I recently finished writing a paper (will add link once it’s published—cross your fingers!). I would have used LaTeX, but under certain circumstances, one must revert to good ol’ .doc format. Now, MS Office on the Mac is a Mess (with a capital M)—your choices are Office ‘04, which runs on Rosetta and is therefore dreadfully slow, or Office ‘08, which is—in short—a giant pile of garbage. So to write this paper, I went with the Pages app from Apple iWork.
Pages, on the whole, is a fine piece of software. There’s lots of little touches that make it stand out from MS Word, as well as Google Docs. For one, it’s very snappy. My paper is loaded almost instantly, where Word takes several seconds. Word even takes several seconds to scroll past an image! (Ugh.) And Pages plays well with Spaces. If you’re a Spaces user, this advantage cannot be overstated—Word ‘04 was already painfully clumsy with its Spaces compatibility, and ‘08 only turns up the pain to 11.
The track changes interface is fantastic, a million times better than Word’s. Not only does it look much cleaner (with comments and change bubbles outside of the page, instead of on it, messing with your layout), but it sports a very clever feature that highlights changes and comments that fall within a selection — or even better, you can make it hide all change bubbles except those within a selection. For pages that have many small changes, that’s a real blessing, as it allows you to focus on exactly the changes you are working on. (As a side note, Pages and MS Word play nice with each other with respect to track changes.)
The one ludicrous, awful, very 1990 thing about Pages is that it doesn’t have an auto-save feature, something that Word got around what, 1997? I realised this the hard way when I lost 5h of work as my Mac froze. (Shimo, the usually excellent VPN client, appears to have been the culprit, btw.) As I rebooted, I searched in vain for a “recover changes” button, a hidden swap file somewhere, anything. Nada. Pages could only show me the last saved version of my work. I still can’t believe that, 3 revisions in, Pages still lacks any form of auto-save or document recovery feature.
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