The AppleWorks User Group (AWUG) announced today that it would also support Apple’s new iWork suite. Future issues of AWUG’s flagship publication, the AppleWorks Journal, will contain articles designed to help AppleWorks users transition to iWork and will help iWork users master the power built into Apple’s new technologies. AWUG will also adapt its extensive library of AppleWorks word processor templates so they are compatible with Pages, the page layout/word processing component of iWork.
An AWUG membership costs $39.95 per year and includes a one-year subscription to AWUG’s flagship publication, the AppleWorks Journal.
For more information about AWUG, visit AWUG’s website: http://www.awug.org/
They must be masochists.
—
I’m really annoyed by MDN right now. I clicked on the box to enter the MDN magic word and got another window open. That completely sucks.
STOP IT DOING THIS. NOW!
Today’s magic word for me is “comes”.
Other than that I have no comment.
Now I’m off to wash my hands…
Percy
Even though a it has been around for a long time, AppleWorks is still a powerful suite of applications with Word Processing, Database (which many people don’t even know it has), Spreadsheets, Presentation (admittedly dated now and replaced by Keynote- but, it still works fine), Painting, and Drawing components. Most people are unaware of what it can do and often talk down about it as though it is some dinosaur from the past. You cannot beat the things you get in it for the “small” [the Magic Word] price that Apple charges. Supporting the many possibilities in AppleWorks is a purpose for the AWUG.
However, I am very pleased they are also taking iWork as part of what they do. That is appropriate. More people should considering joining the AWUG. The AppleWorks Journal always has interesting and useful information.
“They must be masochists.”
No kidding. Pages in a package named iWork is ironic at best. It doesn’t work well at all. Mostly it’s just smoke and mirrors. As soon as you try doing anything substantial with their beautiful templates (and they are beautiful!) you realize you’ve been had. The colors in the templates match the “placeholder” photos. Use your own picture and most likely the surrounding colors will look bad (and/or make your photo look bad). Try changing the surrounding colors and you find there’s a very unintuitive method required for some areas (and no clear way to determine which areas those are without trying to change the background color and finding out it a) didn’t work and b) may have resulted in the foreground/text color changing in another part of the document). Try exporting a Pages document to RTF, Word or HTML and you’ll find the resulting file is not only wrong, but unusable. Try resizing photos or text boxes and you’ll find it’s a jerky, hard to control ordeal even on a reasonably fast machine …
Wow Paul, not a very good review of Pages. Other reviews I have seen have been much more positive. I guess the only way way to find out is to try it myself. If it is as bad as you say I certainly hope Apple can improve on it soon because I would like to use it instead of Word if I can.
Paul, apparently I have had better luck with Pages than you or others. I believe that there must be a new way of approaching the whole application. If one approaches it like just another word processing application, they may not be happy. I am still learning it, but am not unhappy so far. As far as the export problems, and other issues, I expect Apple to release updates soon that will handle those problems. Pending those, I am happy to see its possibilities versus its shortcomings.
Jack, if possible, go to an Apple Store and try before buying. Try the Design Newsletter template. bring up the color chooser and drag a color into the orange box at the bottom and see how the box changes (as expected). Now, click anywhere else in the doc and then try to change the color of the green box in the upper-left. When (if) you figure that out, you might also try exporting the doc as HTML and take a look at the results in Safari. If nothing else, it’s worth a good laugh. You might also set the zoom level (lower left corner of screen) to 100% and take a look at the black text in the orange box at the bottom. It’s not readable below 125%. Worse, you’ll find this text gets converted into an image when you export to HTML and is not readable, either.
I wouldn’t consider Pages a substitute for Word even if it were working correctly. It’s intended more as a page design tool and lacks some features (e.g., you can do a TOC but not an Index, it’s not integrated with the address book so you couldn’t, for example, automatically produce personalized letters or envelopes, …).
I’ve seen some of the kinder reviews but none from anyone who appears to have taken the time to really use it for awhile. I was really hoping for this to be a “killer app,” but it isn’t.