“Late last year, Apple generated a wave of negative press after releasing slimmed down Mac versions of the iWork apps — Keynote, Numbers, and Pages,” Ben Waldie reports for Macworld. “Rewritten from the ground up to focus on ease of use, consistency, and iCloud support, the apps lacked lots of the useful productivity features that Mac users had come to use. One major setback was a significant reduction in AppleScript support, a problem for anyone attempting to automate an iWork-based office workflow.”
“Apple, however, moved quickly to address growing concern, acknowledging the missing features and committing to return many of them in subsequent iWork updates,” Waldie reports. “Some of the promised enhancements included AppleScript improvements in both Keynote and Numbers (curiously, AppleScript improvements in Pages weren’t listed).”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Computerworld’s Evans: ‘For many, iWork is the only productivity solution you’ll ever need’ – April 2, 2014
Apple shows Keynote users more love with significant point update – April 2, 2014
Apple updates iWork for Mac, iOS, and iCloud – April 2, 2014
Associated Press: Don’t overlook Apple’s iWork – March 5, 2014
LAPTOP Magazine reviews Apple’s iWork for OS X: A compelling content creation platform – November 20, 2013
Hands on: Using Apple’s new iWork for iCloud collaboration tools – November 15, 2013
Apple releases next-gen 64-bit iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS; free with new Macs and iOS devices – October 22, 2013
Glad to hear it. I use Applescript a lot.
Now, Tim, if you can make it work as seamlessly with M”Soft Word as the good version did before you screwed it up with the iOS dumb down, that would be great. Great – you remember the meaning of that word from the time when you just followed instructions instead of trying to issue them. Remember?
Are you sat there stroking a white cat by any chance?
I don’t understand what Apple has against implementing AppleScript in Pages. It was only partially supported in the prior versions too, while Numbers and Keynote get significantly more support.
Great, now the 10 people who use AppleScript will finally shut up.
… “use AppleScript” are likely the same people who actually NEEDED some variety of the functions iWork “lost” – if it ever actually HAD them – in the latest “downgrade”. Most people don’t need – EVER – most of the functions Office has that iWork does not.
But, I suspect there are more than “ten” of them.
Make it eleven
iWork and iHome. Unless your company produces Excel and Word documents embedded with scripts and custom functions, it is very unlikely that a person would ever need the Office suite. Apples programs are so much more intuitive and easier to use. I have never run into an import issue with Office that took more than 5 mins to clean up.
A while ago, I set up a Mac to use voice commands to execute a variety of AppleScripts. It was pretty sweet – I could make up new voice commands whenever I got a good idea and some time to figure out how to write it in AppleScript. The biggest issue, though, was that the Mac’s built in mic wasn’t great – I had to be right in front of the computer and the room had to be quiet for it to work. What would really be great is if I could somehow use Siri on my phone to relay my voice commands to my Mac to open AppleScripts there. The iPhone’s mics are so much better picking up voice commands over background noise, and it could be a really useful way to automate all sorts of tasks.
What means this “another win for AppleScript”?
Another?
If AppleScript’s syntax wasn’t changed into denser and denser Venusian with every OS “update,” that crock-of-shit Automator would never have had to be C-sectioned into existence.
There is absolutely no reason why Apple had to create a period of time when people who rely on features in Pages 4 have to put up with their absence for a year or to. It’s not as if I can put off tomorrow’s mail merge for a year.
To make things worse, they introduced a new file format with the same extension and did not offer a batch file converter to convert Pages 4 to doc or rtf.