I have come across two things that I can do in InDesign but can’t find a way to do in Pages. First, I can’t find a way to make objects snap to grid lines — not crucial, but you can do it in InDesign and it’s a help. Second, I can’t find a way to vertically justify the text in a column.
Basically, the lack of these two functions means that aligning the bottoms of side-by-side columns of text takes a lot of fussy tweaking instead of a few quick actions.
I bought the new iWork ’08 suite last week, lured by the new spreadsheet program and the promise of enhanced Word-compatibility which might make it possible to do work from the office on my laptop without having to actually buy Microsoft Office for the Mac.
The compatibility seems okay but I forgot to investigate whether Pages works well with Equation Editor or MathType, which are essential for my work as a technical editor. It doesn’t, so I won’t be using it for office work after all.
Right now I’m trying out Pages for layout, which I usually do in InDesign. I’m laying out the announcement for the New Year’s Billy gathering. It’s pretty easy to use, and so far I haven’t encountered anything I want to do but can’t. It’s obvious at a glance that Pages has fewer capabilities than InDesign, but so far it looks like the ones that are missing are things I don’t use.
Many of the functions are easier and more intuitive to use than in InDesign. Dropping graphics onto a page and adjusting how text wraps or doesn’t wrap around them seems easier. Adjusting how an image in the text is sized and cropped is a bit easier and faster in Pages than in InDesign, and that’s something that comes up a lot because, unless you’re dealing with an image of a painting or an art photograph that should be shown complete or not at all, you want to be able to tweak the image to fill the space available — shaving a little off an edge of a snapshot, for example.
A feature called “Instant Alpha” allowed me to very quickly remove the white background from some graphics (so that the text would flow around the object rather than around the white rectangle containing the object); that’s possible in InDesign, too, but it takes more time; in Pages, it was just a matter of two mouse clicks. Nice.
This announcement is taking me about as long to lay out in Pages as it would in InDesign, but a lot of that time has been spent looking things up in the help file and just generally exploring where everything is. I think for fairly straightforward layout jobs, once I get to know the program, Pages will be faster.
I haven’t had time to look at Keynote and Numbers yet.
This is a pretty funny blog.
I’ve been having a little problem where my USB modem often stops picking up a connection at my office desk in the afternoon — especially, it seems, on a hot afternoon, or at least the problem has been occurring more often as the weather’s been getting hotter.
But I’ve never had a problem on the train or on BART, as long as I’m not underground, so I’ve been figuring that it’s not lack of coverage, it’s that there’s something about my office building that is interfering with the signal. My cell phone can get a signal indoors just fine, but sometimes my modem can’t.
It occurred to me this afternoon to put a USB cable between the modem and my laptop and run the cable to somewhere I could get a better signal. So I tried it, and all I had to do was open the window slightly and put the modem between the glass and the screen, et voila. Then I moved the modem all the way to one side of the window to keep it out of direct sunlight, and I’ve been connected without a break since.
I learned a new word the other day: iPerbole.
This review of the iPhone (plus this addendum) seems more cool-headed than most, though — neither all gee-whiz about it nor venting hatred of everything Apple just because it’s Apple.
They tell me a few things about the iPhone that make me more certain that I’m better off without one, though, at least until some improvements are added.
The iPhone can display, but not edit, Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Portable Document Format files. Conversely, iTunes doesn’t provide you with a computer-editable copy of any notes you jot down in the iPhone’s Notes program (although it does back them up automatically).
One of my main uses for a PDA is as a portable notepad, but I have to be able to send my notes back and forth between the PDA and my laptop and modify them in either place, or it’s not any more useful to me than carrying around a paper notebook and pen (which I often do anyway).
Switching between iPhone programs happens almost instantly, but moving data between them is just about impossible without copy or paste commands.
Ugh. For me, anyway, an important part of processing my email is quickly filing away any info I may want to refer to later, which means cutting and pasting into my note organizing software or into Address Book or whatever, so that I can get the email message out of the inbox and into the archives.
Spending time online will, however, expose the sluggishness of AT&T’s barely-faster-than-dialup Edge data service.
The USB modem I bought to use with my laptop uses 3G, which is much faster, about as fast as a low-end DSL connection.
Typing a Web address or an e-mail message reveals another awkwardness: text entry. Without a real keyboard, you have to tap on an onscreen substitute that offers no tactile feedback and puts punctuation and letters on separate screens.
I’m a touch typist and have found that I get frustrated writing on a PDA, whether it’s by way of Graffiti or a touch-screen keyboard or whatever.
An awful lot of my computer time is spent during my long commute by way of BART and CalTrain, or while sitting at a café somewhere, where opening up my laptop usually isn’t any hassle. So as beautiful a piece of equipment as the iPhone certainly is, it doesn’t seem to suit my needs right now well enough for me to justify the price and the two-year commitment.
Just got back from a short walk to stretch my legs. It’s around 3:30 pm and the iPhone goes on sale at 6:00 pm and there are already 40 or 50 people lined up in front of the AT&T store on the corner near where I work.
I love the look of the iPhone but it just doesn’t do enough that I can’t already do for me to want to add one more electronic device to carry around. I’ve got a cell phone on a cheap pay-as-you-go plan that rarely costs me more than $20 a month — I just don’t use it that much. I have an iPod with 30 GB, don’t want to switch to one with just four. I have a modem for my laptop now so I can do email and surf the ‘Net anywhere I can get a cell phone signal. I have a PDA and have learned from it that I hate doing long emails without a proper keyboard I can touch-type on, and for short emails I can text-message on my cell phone. The iPhone doesn’t do anything much that I don’t already have covered. Sure is pretty, though.
Now, if it were a real full-featured PDA that was based on OS X and could run a wide variety of programs and synced well with the Mac, I’d be more tempted. My PDA is Palm-based and has kind of a crappy sync interface with the Mac, and that has kept me from using it more. But I have Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync now which makes it a lot less of a nuisance, and I’m starting to make more use of it again.
Scratchings 