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Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2005 7:39 AM EST
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  • Mac
198 Comments | Add A Comment
198 Comments

A First Look at Pages

The idea behind Pages is to make document creation, layout and publishing easier than ever before.  If you've ever used Word for anything above and beyond just a text editor, it often times have little quirks that can frustrate you after dealing with them for a while - such as footnotes that don't always work properly, an ornery table of contents or especially dealing with graphics and text boxes and getting them to not screw up the pagination of your document.  Word is a very powerful word processor, but in all of its might, it has lost a considerable amount of simplicity.  Then there are page layout and publishing applications that generally require a higher level of expertise than what the beginner user is going to have, and they are generally much more expensive than $79.  So there is a need for something else. The question is whether or not Pages happens to be it. 

Before I get to the built-in templates within Pages, let me talk a bit about the interface.  When you're first dropped into Pages, you immediately notice that the interface is extremely bare, almost to the point where it is bland.  There is no font drop-down - all of the buttons you're used to seeing in a word processor or any application for that matter are all gone.  There's a row of 10 oversized buttons at the top of the page and that's it. 

The default view in Pages has no rules, no layout markers, nothing.  You can turn all of those on, but for me, they unnecessarily clutter the interface to be on all the time.

I mentioned that there is no font drop-down in Pages. Instead, in order to change the fonts and settings, you have to use the font panel, which you bring up by either hitting the button on the tool bar or hitting Command + T.  Despite my initial reactions to it, I actually preferred Apple's decision here simply because I rarely adjusted my fonts when typing in Word; it was just something that I had expected to be in the toolbar and unnecessarily so.  Font sizes are another thing, and this is one area where Pages encourages you to go in a much different route from what you may be used to.  Normally, you create page or paragraph headers by either making the header bold or increasing the font size. You can obviously do the same using the font panel in Pages, but there is an alternative.  Pages heavily encourages the use of styles for text, which are both pre-defined and user-definable. 

The other thing that Pages does extremely well is its handling of columns - there's a columns drop-down at the top of the page that will let you select from 1 - 4 columns.  You can adjust the number of columns within any shape object or apply it to the document as a whole, quite easily.

Despite the relatively simple interface, there are quite a few controls offered within Pages, they just remain hidden until you bring up the Pages Inspector.  The Inspector window is a small window that lets you adjust options for everything in Pages, as well as features things like document information.  If there's anything that you need to do or find in Pages, it's in the Inspector. 

For example, if you want to define more than 4 columns, click on the column button in the Inspector.  If you want to change how text wraps around objects, click on the appropriate button in the Inspector.  Colors, tables, charts, everything is customizable from the Inspector - and when you're done, you can leave it on the desktop or hide it.  You can also open up multiple Inspectors, each at a different settings page if you like having access to everything without bringing up more windows. 


Multiple Inspectors

iWork '05 A First Look at Pages (continued)
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  • elvisizer - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    also, someone needs to tall anand that you can get pictures out of iphoto via drag and drop, not just going to Share->Export.

  • Saist - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    Wanted to step in and comment that the Microsoft Office problem is also solved by a little application that you may or may not have heard of.

    It's called.

    OPEN OFFICE.

    http://www.openoffice.org

  • wilburpan - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    #44

    Not to mention the lack of a need to buy an antivirus subscription, which kicks in at $25/year for Norton's antivirus program. If you keep your Windows PC for 4 years, that's an extra $75 in software updates you'll need to buy.

  • shuttleboi - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    "The comparison above was very deliberately set up to focus on hardware alone, ignoring things like software differences and form factor differences. "

    Hello? The Mac Mini comes with over $100 worth of software. Where are you going to get a software suite on Wintel for $100? Kazaa?

  • edwardhchan - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    #25: I used a Kingston ValueRAM PC2700 1GB DIMM... Works like a charm. Just a note on using as a media server: Divx and MPEG4 playback is fine with VLC. DVD is good too, but the DVD player doesn't have a very good de-interlacing algorithm. My Mini is being watched on a 43" Samsung DLP at 1280x720. Beautiful display for the compy :)

  • Eug - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    Apple has just dropped pricing on some of the BTO options:

    BlueTooth/Airport Express combo now $99.
    1 GB RAM now $325.
    80 GB hard drive upgrade now $50.

    And now the SuperDrive option is 8X. Cool. :)

  • pbrice68 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    Just a quick FYI:

    TextEdit does open MicroSoft Word documents. Obviously, it doesn't support all of Word's features, but it will open and display the text and try to maintain all of the formatting.

    Although you went over a great deal in iPhoto, you really didn't mention it's built in slideshow features, professionally printed books, and the ability to purchase prints directly from the application. The books really need to be seen to appreciate them.

  • Doormat - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    #26: the mini takes a regular DIMM, not an SO-DIMM. 1GB PC2700 DIMM is under $200. Plus the putty knife you'll need to open and install it.

    And I was planning on getting one until I read that they had problems at 19x12. As someone who is going to hook this to a HDTV at 1920x1080, this is disappointing news. Maybe next years refresh with a 9600+ with 64MB framebuffer will do the trick.

  • barnett25 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    First I want to say that I loved the article. With that out of the way I have to ask, when you said that Pages exports well to html, what were you smoking? I just recieved iWork yesterday, I bought it becuase Pages seemed like an easy way to make good looking webpages. I saw the family newsletter template and knew my mom would love to have a webpage based around that. But try saving just the template, with no editing, to html. You get a big mess. Pages was not ready to be shipped. It's export to .doc format is messed up with the supplied templates too, but I can understand that being due to Word's lack of refinment and features. I do like pages, but it seems to only be good if you are either printing, exporting to pdf, or simply saving as a pages file. For any other kind of exporting it's next to worthless. (By the way, if you go to Apple discussions you will see dozens of people with similar compaints to mine.)

  • jasonsRX7 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link

    Apple today lowered some of the prices on the BTO Mac Minis at the Apple store.

    http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/01/25/lower.mac.m...
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