Initial Impression of Pages

First reaction: very much a Mac OS X app. If you closed your eyes and visualized what a modern word processor by Apple would look like, you have a good idea of what Pages is. Elegant design and consistency within the Mac OS X universe.

The primary difference from Word in terms of output is that Pages has strong layout functionality, in addition to word processing. This a big deal for me because I never could justify buying InDesign. I just sorta made do with Illustrator. Nor did I want switch back and forth between a layout app and a word processing app.

Much like Keynote, the most important tools are easily accessible, and I'm not bogged down by a whole bunch of UI that doesn't apply to my task. If you like the Keynote philosophy, Pages will just feel right.



For me, the most important design decision Apple made was to not clone Word. Not only is this not the type of product I'd want, it would put Apple in the position of constantly playing catch-up.

The export to PDF works beatifully. Though in the test I ran, the HTML output doesn't seem to reflect the document layout at all. All the text is there, but the object placement is much different. Maybe there is some tweaking to do, not sure.

A template in Pages is a meta-template of sorts. You can choose a specific template for each page in your document, or you can just keep typing forever and get a new default page each time you reach the end of the current one (as in Word). Table of contents can be generated automatically, and there's easy access to styles, lists, margins and the like.

Like Keynote, only took about an hour of messing around to figure out how the app works. Though it does come with a half-size user's guide. There's some interesting psychology behind the miniature guide, as it seems less intimidating and, thus, more likely to be read.

Apple hit the nail right on the head with this. Pages provides a human-centric approach to document creation. Exactly what I've been looking for.

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