“Dear oh dear. They really have done it, haven’t they?” Pierre Igot writes for Betalogue. “They have taken what had evolved into a rather decent word processor / page layout application and have eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages is intended.”
“It certainly is not intended for people who, like me, appreciated the combination of simplicity and power that was the hallmark of previous versions of Pages,” Igot writes. “I realize that it must be hard to maintain the right balance between simplicity and power when you try to add more features, more customizability, and so on. But Apple’s engineers appear to have chosen to keep the emphasis on ‘simplicity’ at the expense of ‘power.'”
Igot writes, “They have not just neglected to add features to bring the feature set of the application closer to that of a word processor like Microsoft Word. They have actually removed many features for no apparent reason other than to bring the application in line with its iOS counterpart, which is, inevitably, much less powerful… I guess that, for now, I will continue to use Pages ’09 with all the customizations that I have painstakingly created with AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. But sooner or later, I will have no choice but to switch to something else.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No Pages 5.0 is not an unmitigated disaster. Some guy’s third-party macros no longer work. That’s it in a nutshell. 9 out of 10 Pages users will find Pages 5.0 is an unmitigated triumph!