iWork, worth it ?

Is iWork a product that is worth ?

  • It is worth !

  • It is not !

Results are only viewable after voting.
chevy

chevy

Marvelous Da Vinci
Staff member
Mod
Do you think iWork is a good and complete product ? Or does it still miss too many features ?

What is its first application ? Home ? Small business ? How does it integrate with Quicken ?
 
I'm disappointed because I thought that it would completely replace AppleWorks, whose drafting program I have always found convenient but buggy. Still the demo looked awesome, wish it were included with all new Macs, like iLife. Unfortunately even iWork's meagre system requirements are too much for my old bondiMac. Another excuse to upgrade to the new iMac!

Maybe I'll take a walk over to the Apple Store and check it out...
 
Years ago I used ClarisWorks for everything. I went kicking and screaming to Office. I don't know much about iWork, but the thing that ClarisWorks did really well was integrating differerent doc types into one doc. Text, drawing and spreadsheet - were each treated as a sort of component of a document and depending on which you were working with it would give you the cooresponding UI (menus, tools...). Not the absurd mess in Office where you have completely different UI rules for tables in Word vs spreadsheets in excel... and don't even get me started about importing between Word, PowerPoint and Excel! If iWork follows this same philosophy, I might like to use it for personal use.

P.S. Didn't Apple explore something long ago that went against this whole monolithic app concept. Instead of giant apps that try to do everything you would have an almost generic doc type that you could then apply different tools to - text, image, tables... Was it OpenDoc - or is that something else? Whatever it was, it was a really neat idea. Alas, imagine our world had MS not been able to take it over...
 
I think its pretty clear that this is a very, very different office suite to MS-Office, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, AppleWorks and StarOffice. Its design is something completely different, and as such I can quite easily see that people will happily use this alongside more traditional office packages and word processors.

As for value for money, I think iWorks price point is fantastic and I will definitely be buying it. As a regular Keynote user, I know just how powerful that application can be. I like the fact that iWork supports Flash, PDF, MS-Office, and Adobe formats such as PhotoShop and Illustrator. It does these extremely well, for instance you can drag in a multi-layer PhotoShop file and it brings in all the layers as separate objects, and then groups them, allowing you to do some pretty phenomenal graphical trickery in your documents.

And all this at the price of a consumer-end product. I should hopefully have a copy of this arriving not long after Jan 22nd, so I can give it a more thorough investigation.
 
Im going to buy it.. I have Mellel (i still say it's the best Cocoa word processor around) but it doesn't do everything i want, and it doesn't have great Word compatibility.. I only need simple formatting.. and the added bonus of some layouting tools built in, is just brilliant!
 
I think almost all the announcements took me by suprise when I watched the keynote the day before yesterday. iWork looks like a briliant piece of software that is worth owning for the presentations and reports I have to turn in for school. Plus the formating in Pages surpasses formating found in Microsoft Word and others. I like the integration of iLife as well.
 
I don't think it's worth the money since as a student I get Office at a discount. Besides, Office for the Mac isn't a bad product and it works much better than Office on Windows. I just love the floating palettes as opposed to the multitude of toolbars you find in the Windows version of Office.

iWork looks nice for those who don't have Office. But for those who do, I don't see much incentive to buy this package.
 
audi_luv said:
I would be more willing to pay for a supported commercial version of OpenOffice/StarOffice for Mac.
Click to expand...

This will probably never happen. The Aqua version of OpenOffice has been cancelled (source).

Stick with NeoOffice/J or some other office suite.
 
I don't think it's worth it, at least not the WP part of it. Keynote2...yes, but Pages no. This is of course based on what I've seen so far...maybe sometime soon I'll be able to take a trip up to the Apple Store and play with it, but until then I'll stick with the other options out there. If I do decide to upgrade, it'll probably be just for Keynote2.
 
At the Education price point ($49), it's a great deal. If you consider that Keynote was $99 when it came out, now you can get two apps for $20 less ($50 less in the Education pricing), it's an even better deal.

This is what bugs me though. Apple bills this as a suite of apps. It's not a suite - it's a duo. The other thing is the tag line Steve used at the keynote..."Building a successor to Appleworks". Well, Appleworks has word processing, calculations, presentations, drawing and database components. iWork has word processing and presentations. More than half the suite is missing.

What Apple isn't saying is that iWork '06 will obviously add another cog to that wheel, probably the Excel like component. Of course, the price will increase at that point.

What bugs me is that Apple doesn't seem to see the immediate need to replace Appleworks outright, right now. Pages was designed by the Keynote team. So the team that was responsible for Keynote handled the entire iWork product. It seems if Apple wanted to get this out the door, they would assign more resources to it. Instead, it looks like they will piece this "suite" together over time with the team they currently have in place.

I love Keynote, so I anted up for the upgrade. Pages looks pretty amazing. Since school and my job are both standardized on Word (blech), I don't know how much I will get to use it. But if it handles Word docs as seemlessly as Keynote handles PowerPoint files, it may replace Word for me.
 
Didn't Keynote used to list for $99? Now you get both Keynote and Pages for $79. So at least it is a better deal.

Oops, serpicolugnut just beat me to the punch. Anyway as I previously posted, I too wish Apple had revamped all of AW rather than replacing it piece-meal-- AW for OS X was such a let-down, worked better in OS 9. Wonder when it might be confirmed that Apple is planning a more complete suite for iWorks '06.
 
iWork is just the beginning of what may be a full suite in the near future. After all Keynote was a standalone product until now. I think we may see much more improvements as iWork evolves and more features added. I think once Tiger is released Apple will be more focused on applications and iWork may be the one that may get the most attention.
 
I must say, it is hard to dive into iWork and just play like you can with iLife (especially GarageBand). Sure, the demos look cool (and there are some amazing things you can do with these programs based on the demos), but when you finally get to use one of the computer at the expo and you fire Pages up, it's like... okay, so now what? I think, if you're going to check it out at an Apple store or a retailer, go there with a specific project in mind and see how easy (or hard, perhaps) it is to make.
 
Exactly. My post was geared toward a situation like mdnky's, where he was going to go "play" with iWork (note how it's iWork and not iPlay ;)). I'm saying, if you want to play, play by bringing your work along. :)
 
serpicolugnut said:
Since school and my job are both standardized on Word (blech), I don't know how much I will get to use it. But if it handles Word docs as seemlessly as Keynote handles PowerPoint files, it may replace Word for me.
Click to expand...

I hate how Institutions are "Standardising" on MS Word.
I don't know how many Job Applications ask for the Resumé to be presented in a "MS Word Compatible Format". It's the same with Major Business and, I presume, with education.
I recommend everyone change the default "Save As…" format to RTF or XML in every instance of Word they have access to.
I also recommend presenting non-draft documents as PDFs or (Microsofts Proprietary) MDI format.
If you have to submit MS Word Documents, intersperse it with as many little non-typographical enhancements as you can, such as Revision Notes and Comments. This might just point out to the submittee that MS Word is an Editing Format and not a Publishing Format.

If worse comes to worse and they complain about submitting PDFs or MDIs, comment that someone you know submitted their Resumé in an Editable File Format and the Employment Agency modified their details without consent.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top