I am currently working with a Wiki for the design documentation of a rather large project. From time to time however, I need to pull all that work down into a single file and for those situations I usually end up with some kind of word processor.
And although the Ribbon has replaced the obese menus of Microsoft Word I still prefer Pages (part of the iWork package) by Apple. This is simply because I do not very often exchange (directly) editable documents with others, so I tend to use PDFs and Pages is simply better aligned to the way I think and work. But not everyone are in my situation so Pages needs to be able to dependably handle Office documents. Until that happens Pages will never be considered as a serious candidate for word processing. There is no way around this. Apple needs to make sure Pages can speak Word perfectly.
But there are other reasons why not more people use Pages. First of all, there is no Pages reader. A reader has to be made and it needs to be free and multi-platform. (Of course, they should do this for Keynote and Numbers as well.) Again, this is just something that simply needs to be done. There is basically no good reason why they shouldn’t.
Still this isn’t all Apple should be doing. To make Pages a more attractive word processor they should integrate it into other products, and in this case in particular I am thinking of Safari. Imagine seeing Safari having Pages as a format option on the save sheet. I guess most teachers would hate that feature, but for me and my Wiki, the ability to save my online work as a directly editable Pages document with a single click on the mouse would be awesome.
Posted by Johan