Pages 5: An Unmitigated Disaster – Veteran Mac Blogger

Betalogue’s Pierre Igot saysthat with Pages 5, Apple have taken what had evolved into a rather decent word processor / page layout application and eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk.

He observes that that Apple’s engineers appear to have chosen to keep the emphasis on “simplicity” at the expense of “power,” and have actually removed many features for no apparent reason other than to bring the application in line with its iOS counterpart, which is, inevitably, much less powerful, and that in an era of mobile, touch-based computing, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Apple engineers to understand that document writers spend most of their days with their hands on an actual keyboard, and providing easy access to functionality via the keyboard is particularly important for them.

Igot laments that Mac power users have been complaining about the “dumbing down” trend in computing that the mobile era has ushered in, and now it’s definitely come to hurt us in a big way – as if the entire iWork team of engineers has been replaced by iOS specialists with little or no interest in the needs of “prosumers” and the like, which he finds profoundly sad and depressing. Indeed, Pages 5 is so bad that he actually might have to erase it from his hard drive altogether, in order to avoid any confusion with multiple Pages file formats and the like.

Mac App Store Bug Allows iWork Trial Users To Update The Entire Suite For Free (Update: Aperture, Too)

9To5 Mac’s Mike Beasley reports tha users who have previously downloaded the free 30-day iWork trial and kept it on their systems found themselves able to update to the latest version of Apple’s productivity suite for free yesterday due to what is apparently a bug with the way the store finds copies of the software purchased through other sources.

For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/NM2G6k