“With the latest release of Apple’s office productivity suite, iWork ’08, the Pages application moves into the ranks of full-fledged word processing applications. Previously known more for its page layout capabilities than for its word processing capabilities, Pages now enables users to switch seamlessly between writing and designing documents. In addition, the application offers 140 document templates and a snazzy track-changes feature, both of which work to position iWork ’08 as an apt rival to Microsoft’s Office 2004 for Mac in the OS X-compatible office productivity arena.”
Take a bite out of Office’ Insane market share and dominance.
The problem wasn’t just lock in – how many suites can actually COMPETE with Office?
I’m hearing none. A few people will say Star/Openoffice.
Other than that…nothing…
Hopefully this at least end’s Microsoft’s dominance of the mac platform…Like Safari is ending IE’s
but they are introducing yet another proprietary format. They are dumb. If they used odf as their default format, this would have a chance. Using the proprietary format, almost no sane people are going to purchase the software. Only dumb home users that don’t know any better.
I agree with your point about yet another proprietary format. If you only could have kept tha trollish second part of your comment to yourself, you wouldn’t be voted down so hard.
Edited 2007-08-31 22:53
What’s even worse is that Apple changes the document format for every new iWork release. That makes it a moving target for developers who want to write a convertor.
In other Words (pardon the pun, if you will, or you can choose to hang me, but make it pleasant, will ya?) Apple is doing the same sort of thing Microsoft (and all other proprietary developers) do with their formats: change them over time for each new version as new requirements dictate.
Well, the nature of products that keep on gaining features and persist data and evolve over time is that the file format changes, unless someone that started out at the first meeting had an all-arching view of exactly what the software would do for all time and eternity, or at least until it ceased to matter.
Can anyone convince me or anyone with sufficient logical argument (not feelings, but logic and proof) that there’s a single all-encompassing file format specification that will cover every single thing that currently exists as part of something as complex as text documents with formatting, etc. that will never have need to be expanded in the future?
I have thrown down the gauntlet to anyone so bold as to try to convince me
Even ODF needs updates. As long as updates don’t break backward compatibility just because they can and as long as the changes are documented there’s no problems with updates.
ODF 1.1 (the current version) should support everything used by iWork 08. KWord is frame-based just like Pages and Numbers’ concept with several sheets on one page is basically the same as KOffice 2’s Flake Shape concept.
If the KOffice developers can implant all that with ODF, Apple could have done the same.
But then if someone writes a document in staroffice 12 which uses odf 2.2 and I want to open that in ilife ’11 which uses 1.7 and it don’t know about all the new stuff in 2.2 won’t I have the same problem and can’t open it completely?
But sure, the actuall data within the file is readable.
Can anyone add to ODF? Could Apple say “hey we need this functionallity added, add that so we can use it” and it would get added even if openoffice didn’t understood it, got a use for it and couldn’t show it?
If not it’s rather useless and Apples decision is understandable. I doubt they do it as much for vendor lockin as they do it because it’s more convenient for them. Also Pages have existed longer than ODF have been a standard haven’t it? And only open-/staroffice used it back then.
It’s the developer’s responsibility to keep his application updated to follow subsequent ODF specifications.
Seems like it:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=offic…
Yes.
As I said: Pages changes its file format every release.
Changes? Or do you mean updates?
Changes
It’s entirely possible to make a file format that is both forwards and backwards compatible. I’ve actually done this before (although for email spool files rather than office documents). Obviously, older versions of a program won’t be able to take advantage of newer features in the file format, but they should still be able to basically display the document.
That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily horrible that Apple doesn’t use ODF. I do think that they should release the specifications for their file format and stick to them. They should also probably support opening and saving to ODF so that exchanging documents is easier.
When you have the chance, take a read at the index.xml file iWork ’08 apps generate. The structure is so freakin’ obvious that it’s self-documenting.
Thank God, BTW.
Edit: stumbled upon this:
http://ctrambler.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/iworks-xml-format-vs-odf-…
Nice, people already did that
Edited 2007-09-01 07:07
“Can anyone convince me or anyone with sufficient logical argument (not feelings, but logic and proof) that there’s a single all-encompassing file format specification that will cover every single thing that currently exists as part of something as complex as text documents with formatting, etc. that will never have need to be expanded in the future?”
While I don’t use Windows at home I used to and from what I understand the current version of WordPerfect, or at least versions 6 through 12 all used to same file format. Meaning that any version of WordPerfect from 6 on was able to open up any document created with any version of WordPerfect 6 and on WITHOUT having to be saved differently like MS Word and many other text editors/word processors.
Good point, but keep in mind this project was always meant to be more of a desktop publishing app than a word processing app. In the desktop publishing world screen-to-printer accuracy, a versatile toolbox and general ease of use are much, much more important than interoperability. If you design a publication on your Mac, chances are you’re going to print it on your printer. There are exceptions, of course, such as designing something to be sent to a pro printing shop, but not every pro shop has every DTP program either, so the preferred method is to export to PDF anyway.
Now that they are adding more word processing features, it would indeed be nice to be able to save in an open format as default. However, I think this program will continue to be more DTP than WP, no matter how good it gets at both. Besides, NeoOffice is continuing to improve and one day it will take over as the office suite of choice on Macs.
Yeah because history has shown that people, as a whole, care about propietary vs. open formats when choosing things like software.
Your readings of history are very partial and possibly self-interested.
Human beings have this penchant for learning from past mistakes. The internet has really shown the power and relevance of open formats. Most seasoned IT professionals have been burned at least once by proprietary document formats or know firsthand someone who has and therefore they are determined to not make the same mistake again.
You may think this is irrelevant. You may think that people are too stupid to tell the difference between proprietary formats and open ones, but even non-expert computer users are increasingly become aware of the benefits of true interoperability, because they too have been bitten before by the inability to carry their data with them as they please.
Edited 2007-08-31 23:33
It is irrelevant. People are not too stupid.
But HISTORY is on my side. Propietary vs. Open is not as big of an issue as you may think it is software.
What about GIF vs. PNG?
What about it? Both are quite popular. I’d argue GIF was more popular for quite a long time.
Not only that, they also serve different purposes.
Wasn’t Compuserve’s licensing fees for GIF one of the reasons PNG was developed?
Yes. That didn’t stop GIF from being used though.
Perhaps it’s about time it was. Perhaps it’s time we started educating people in the importance of open document formats, so they truly understand the implications of being so apathetic.
Unfortunately, while their teachers in the school room are all brainwashed puppets, this will take a looooooooong time
It’s just XML, and without binary stupidity throughout. An iWork parser/converter could be written with relative ease.
Some people need to get off of their high chair. It’s XML – it’s not closed, it’s just easily read XML that’s dictated by a closed group, instead of an open one.
Whilst ODF support in iWorks would be nice so that I wouldn’t have to use OOo for ODF documents, it doesn’t rule the suite out completely. I can save my docs to PDF easily, I can save as OOXML and then convert that to ODF. My documents are not suddenly trapped in some binary, patent-encumbered cage that guarantees that they will be lost forever in moments to come.
iWorks is a fantastic, fresh and innovative office suite; something that market has needed for ages, and I used the trial, purchased it, and promptly put MSO in the bin.
I don’t think I’m dumb. But I may be wrong. I use it for my work and all my letters. I know the value of open formats, but in the real world, people use, unfortunately, doc and rtf and pdf. I export my work to doc, and my letters to pdf.
Sure, I should fight the tendency, wave the flag of liberty, systematically send my work in odf… Then I would probably been asked either to work with the formats used in the firm, or to f–k off. Reality bites.
While the open document format is a noble cause, and one that can save us a lot of headaches in the future, Manik hit the nail in the head. You either play nice with the rest of the world, of f* off.
I had the enlightening experience of applying to work for a place whose HR department did not know how to open PDF files. They encouraged people to submit their resumes & cover letters electronically, but after a few email exchanges with them, and despite the fact that I pointed them to adobe’s website to download a free PDF reader, they refused to ‘go the extra step’ to view my resume in PDF format (my resume was produced in in-design and not available as a word file)
I was kindly told to either submit my resume as a word file, or snail-mail it to them. I elected to do neither – but the point is valid, you play nice with the rest of the world, or they tell you to f-off, even if you are using a public open standard 😉
This reflects my experience when job hunting. I’ve been looking for work and the number of online recruitment sites that only accept a Word document as your resume is staggering. Why MS Word only? Why not accept PDF too, which IMHO is better since the layouts/fonts are guaranteed to be preserved?
Some things in life vex me; This is one of them.
Because they’re brain dead idiots, that’s all there is to it.
Whilst the education system in most countries only teaches people how to use MS Office, I don’t hold out much hope of this changing any time soon.
but they are introducing yet another proprietary format. They are dumb. If they used odf as their default format, this would have a chance. Using the proprietary format, almost no sane people are going to purchase the software. Only dumb home users that don’t know any better.
All OSX software can export/print to pdf, which is pretty universally readable.
Also you totally missed the point that this is in fact a software suite aimed at the people you so condescendingly refer to as “dumb home users.” People are not dumb because they don’t agree with your philosophy BTW.
What’s the most common Print Format? PDF.
Export to PDF is what people care about.
How about WordPerfect?
Edited 2007-08-31 22:54
I used to LOVE WordPerfect. Then Corel bought it and has been screwing it more and more with each release. No problem though, I switched over to Mac about six years ago so it doesn’t matter anymore to me. Ok, I’m still pissed at Corel.
I don’t use any Microsoft Products on my home computers and use them as little as possible at work. I use an old version of WordPerfect there. I even fix corrupted Word documents with it.
I love WordPerfect Office, specially Quatro Pro and WordPerfect. The simplicity of WordPerfect is what I like the most. I downloaded the trial version of WordPerfect Office, and it’s petty great. As far as iWork goes, Keynote’08 is far better than PowerPoint,m which I could say the same for Pages. How does Numbers’08 compare to Microsoft Excel.
Edited 2007-09-01 08:17
WordPerfect 5 was the sole reason I rushed head-first into Mocrosoft Word and never looked back.
Regardless of “proprietary this, and lock-in that” Microsoft’s one shining star in their stable continues to be the core MS Office suite…Word, Power Point, and Excel. There is none better.
It depends on on what the end users expectations are.
I’d love to get to the day when people can sit around and say, “I use StarOffice”, “I use iWorks”, “I use Microsoft Office”, “and we can all work together on projects easily!”. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’, there are different ways of doing something; the problem with Microsoft Office, it tries to do it all – and in the process angering everyone off at the same time.
I love using StarOffice, I like it over Microsoft Office, but at the same time, I’m sure there are those who Microsoft Office – thats good. The problem only occurs when I need to transfer my documents to a friend who is running Microsoft Office. If Microsoft just accepted that not all people are going to be happy with Office and worked with the ODF committee, we’d be all sitting around talking about how nice Microsoft is.
“Hopefully this at least end’s Microsoft’s dominance of the mac platform…Like Safari is ending IE’s”
That’s great but we (Mac users) should also be wary of Apple’s “dominance of the mac platform”. Most Mac users I know have almost no non-Apple software on their computer.
This even includes developers, since one must use Apple’s dev tools to make universal binaries, which essentially put competing devs tools out of business on the Mac, despite tools like CodeWarrior being much better than Apple’s offerings.
So Safari eliminates IE, as you said. iWork eliminates MS Office, Neo Office, etc. ProjectBuilder/XCode replace CodeWarrior. iLife kills off the entry-level multimedia tool market on the Mac, and Apple’s high-end offerings are trying to do the same on the high-end.
To make matters “worse” Apple bundles lots of their software with the OS and/or the hardware, making it all the harder for anyone to compete.
Vendor lock-in is not a Microsoft-only thing.
Edited 2007-09-01 00:58
Does this mean you agree that vendor lock-in is bad?
“Does this mean you agree that vendor lock-in is bad?”
There can be good things about it, as google_ninja mentions, but generally speaking it’s bad because once a vendor has “locked-in” a customer, that vendor can put out shoddy products and retain said customer because he’s “locked-in”.
Windows ME was an abomination, released because MS felt confiddent in their market position to release utter garbage to the public. Mac Word 6 was horrible.
As for Apple, most Mac users *like* Apple lock-in, and perhaps rightfully so, since Apple hasn’t put out trash like MS has (well, not recently anyway). But I’ve been a Mac dev since the 80’s and XCode, while certainly not trash, is pitiful compared to CodeWarrior (which XCode put out of business). I venture to say that if CodeWarrior were still around, XCode would be much better than it is. So there’s one example of a bad aspect of Apple lock-in, but normal users wouldn’t run into that.
Also, apparently the new version of iMovie is horrendous, according to reviews. So Apple may be slipping up themselves now, and it may be due to lack of competition on the Mac platform.
Edited 2007-09-03 18:32
Apple is and always has been the king of vendor lock-in, nothing MS has ever done comes close to how much they control on their platform.
IMO, integration is not a bad thing, even when it comes at the expense of lock-in. As long as the stack is good as a whole.
I’ll see your one’s own Vendor lock-in to one’s own Hardware and raise you Industry Vendor wide lock-in, the Microsoft Way.
It’s more then that, Apple leverages its total control of the platform all the time. itms/itunes/ipod integration is a great example. OSX only running on Macs with the mainboard dongle. Apple bundling iLife with all Macs.
MS has a software stack, but it doesnt matter too much what hardware it runs on. Apple has a complete platform stack, from peripherals, to hardware, to software, to online services. Granted, MS is alot bigger, but bigger doesnt mean more control.
I’ll repeat again, as long as there are advantages, I don’t mind vender lock-in. I used to develop on JSP/Java/Oracle/Server 2k3. Even though we never did, it would have been fairly easy to swap out our db and OS for another. Now I work on ASP.net/C#/SQL-Server 2k5/Server 2k3, and the whole experience is a hell of alot better. I am losing the ability to swap out components, but I am gaining a hell of alot in productivity due to the integration of the stack.
Apple leverages its software to sell hardware. This isn’t rocket science.
Microsoft strong-arms hardware vendors to pre-install their OS and office suite on their systems.
If you think writing software to make your hardware attractive is evil then life must be one continuous evil existence.
…and Microsoft leverages its control of its operating system to sell software. How is this different?
Yes, but this is not vender lock-in, this is shifty anti-competitive corporate practice. Vender lock-in means that when you buy into product a, you are also buying into b and c, and to switch will require not just switching a, but also b and c.
to quote myself
Where do you get accusations of evility out of that? I am saying that vendor lock-in isn’t nessicarily a bad thing, as it offers significant advantages.
Your example entrenches you even further into being completely dependent upon Microsoft’s tool stack.
OS X offers a wide variety of software stacks that are cross-platform.
If you’re so platform agnostic how is it you aren’t using Trolltech’s Qt C++ Frameworks in conjunction with various other open source toolsets to make yourself productive?
If you’re so platform agnostic how is it you aren’t using Trolltech’s Qt C++ Frameworks in conjunction with various other open source toolsets to make yourself productive?
But he works on:
I work on ASP.net/C#/SQL-Server 2k5/Server 2k3,
I would suggest Ruby on Rails or even a LAMP stack.
I was using that as an example, vender lock-in goes beyond developing software.
First off, because I would kill myself before going back to c++.
Secondly, as I said, both the quality of .net, and the level of integration between the different products on the stack give a better overall experience then I had on a more replacable stack. And all I am losing is the ability to do something I never did in all the years on it anyways.
“First off, because I would kill myself before going back to c++.”
LOL
I know what you mean. I’m only a hobbyist programmer now, having retired from the biz, but C# is a lot more fun than C++ ever was.
Edited 2007-09-04 14:42
Yeah, I’ve only been in the industry for about five years now. In school, they didn’t teach me c++ because of the low marketability of the language, so my first “real” language was Java. Since then, I have gone back and learned C++ and C on my own, and honestly, it is nothing but frustrations.
C# is very well done. It still has some rough spots, but it fixes alot of the problems with Java, just as Java fixed alot of the problems with C++. What I was talking about specifically though is ASP.net 2.0 (since I’m a webapp developer). I worked with J2EE for 3 years, and used to laugh at the guys doing stuff with ASP classic, since it was a total joke. Now that I’ve gone freelance, I ended up going with ASP.net since J2EE is overkill for most things. I expected it to be easy to do things, but I don’t remember the last time I have been so consistently pleasantly surprised about something. I have been using it for a year, but still, every time I do something in ten minutes that would have taken me a day and a half on J2EE, I smile.
Anyone want to go back to ANSI C ? 😉
You most certainly do not need Apple’s tools to build a universal binary. Xcode does all its compiling with gcc so any third-party could build an IDE on that.
Huh.
When Apple introduced the intel Macs, Jobs said himself at the WWDC that the first step towards creating Universal Binaries was to move to XCode as your IDE.
I know that Adobe and Microsoft were big CodeWarrior users, but had to move everything to XCode.
It’s not GCC that’s the issue, it’s the ability to package intel binary and ppc binary into one package. Only XCode has the ability to do that. CodeWarrior, as you may know, for years had both ppc and intel compilers. But they lacked the ability to package ppc and intel binaries into a package in accordance with Apple’s spec, and Apple refused to help them on that, instead insisting that everyone move to XCode.
As for “any third-party” building the Universal Packaging system on GCC, it’s not been done, so my point stands. In order to create Universal Binaries, one MUST use XCode.
For years the big Mac devs used CodeWarrior rather than MPW/ProjectBuilder/XCode, because it was simply better (despite ProjectBuilder being bundled with OSX). Apple finally figured out a way to beat with CodeWarrior; make XCode a requirement to produce Universal Binaries.
Yeah, MacWrite made it so hard for MS Word to compete…
Oh, wait.
At the end of the day the only good, no lock in format that everyone can read is plain text………
At the end of the day the only good, no lock in format that everyone can read is plain text………
Which is worthless, because plain text cannot do formatting or markup.
After my debacle with Lotus SmartSuite (no longer in development and I have no easy way to use its documents after I switched to Mac OS X), I decided to only use office suites with good ODF support, because that frees me from a particular vendor.
As long as Apple doesn’t add support for ODF to iWork, I won’t use it. It’s a shame, because the iWork 08 trial seemed nice.
Edited 2007-08-31 22:57
Has anyone, you know, actually used it? Would anyone layout, say, a 100 page book with this tool?
Or should they just give up and go straight for TeX or something similar.
Well, Pages handles large documents surprisingly easy and doesn’t really slow down beyond the +100 page mark, so if you don’t know TeX, it’s an OK replacement for book layout, but page management could probably improve a bit. I would love to have had it, when doing reports and have lost many hours of work to Word’s inability (at the time) to handle documents over 30 pages properly.
Another thing is how easily it chews through Word documents. Converting 100+ page Word documents to PDF is a breeze.
Edited 2007-09-01 07:40
Go for LaTeX.
Personally I’m waiting for Mellel to come up with cross-referencing. This is by far my choice for writing long documents. You should give it a try if you’re on OS X and regularly work with long documents.
Nisus Writer Pro is not that bad. It has more features than Mellel but I’ve found myself more productive in Mellel.
Yea, I’m mostly concerned with the layout aspects, so I was hoping that Pages might work well as a Framemaker Light or something without having to go in to the details of learning TeX/LaTeX (which I don’t know at all).
LaTeX is not so bad. It has a pretty steep learning curve, but it’s quite easy to use once you overcome the initial hurdles. Also, you might want to check out LyX, which is a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX.
But after having MS Word eat a chapter of my thesis, I’m forever going to be wary of anything that isn’t a plain text document.
I wrote my thesis in Pages 2 and that’s about 80 pages with quite a lot of graphics. I felt it performed pretty well; certainly I feel Pages’ styles tools are second to none.
I re-opened my thesis in the Page 3 demo and it seems that performance is improved a little when scrolling quickly through, but I may be imagining it.
The only main difference between the 2 concepts is that Word Processing apps are designed along a type writer concept that is more than dated. DTP or page layout apps are roughtly that allowing sane utilisation of the page layout that you want to end up with.
Why we have an app so prevelant in the office which utilises such an archaic way of formatting a printed document is anyones guess but I don’t see why this differentiation should be albe to hold back Apples embracing ODF standards. Interoperability should be the main goal and their seeming to piss that off with all of their apps points big time to Vendor Lockin.
Apple = Microsoft’s Mini Me.
Piss the both of them off.
The reason MS Word is so prevalent is because it sits on the middle ground between being an all out layout program like Framemaker and a simple typewriter. Let’s face it, many times people are only interested in typing up a document. They’re not too fussed about making frames and what have you. Word does this very well. MS Word’s WYSIWYG works for most document types that the home or office would use.
This paradigm breaks down when you start dealing with much more complex documents or documents that are extremely long. For those markets, Word is laughable. Framemaker is king for most publishing houses, and LaTeX is the choice among science types.
Edited 2007-09-01 18:08
Regarding iWork using its own file format rather than ODF, maybe they just decided to use a format that was built with iWork in mind rather than ODF which was built with OO.o in mind. I don’t know when people are going to stop pretending that ODF is some all-encompassing, app-nuetral uber-format, equally suitable for all apps. ODF is essentially OO.o XML 2.0, directly based on OO.o XML 1.0, as stated on OO.o’s own site. It was made to fit OO.o’s feature set and code structure.
I saw a suggestion that Apple add features to ODF to make it suitable for iWork. But why? Why do that rather than use a format that is directly compatible with iWork, a format that fits iWork like a glove? Forcefeeding ODF for iWork use rather than use a format built explicitly for iWork from the ground-up doesn’t make sense.
The only thing is that Apple should release a public spec for iWork’s format, so that if needed, apps can be created to comprehend files written in that format in the case that Apple goes out of business. But there’s no need to use ODF rather than iWork’s own format.
It’s amusing to see so many calling for every other app to jump through hoops to change their code to use OO.o’s format (which OO.o by definition, supports quite naturally, without having to alter hardly any code), as if OO.o’s format is any better than that of say, iWork.
(Whether Apple wants to create some ODF-converter for iWork, like they’ve done for OOXML is another issue.)
Edited 2007-09-01 21:33
“I don’t know when people are going to stop pretending that ODF is some all-encompassing, app-nuetral uber-format, equally suitable for all apps.”
It’s an open specification, therefore it is application neutral. The fact that it originated (or not) with a particular application is irrelevant.
“Forcefeeding ODF for iWork use rather than use a format built explicitly for iWork from the ground-up doesn’t make sense.”
It would certainly be a plus, perhaps even necessary, to have ODF import and export facilities though.
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