iWork ‘08-Pages Review
iWork has been growing in popularity. iWork ‘08 isn’t one giant program as some may think; iWork is composed of three comprehensive applications -Keynote ‘08, Pages ‘08, and Numbers ‘08. These applications are designed to help you and your diligent lifestyle, and they do so with Apple style-beauty and simplicity. This is the second part of my review on the Pages application for iWork ‘08.
The first thing that I noticed in the new Pages is there are massive amounts of templates. In total, there are 145, and I love them all. Pages now has 2 modes, Page Layout and Word Processing. This makes Pages a 2-in-1 application. It does both desktop publishing and word processing. I have not seen anything like this before.
Because Pages is a desktop publishing app as well, it has some cool graphics tools. One worth mentioning is “instant alpha,” which removes backgrounds from photos, leaving just the foreground. This is very cool, and it works most of the time. You simply select a range of colors in a photo, and “instant alpha” will remove all of the similar colors.
Another cool feature is the “contextual format bar.” If you are typing or editing text, it shows fonts and font sizes. If you are doing something with an image, it will change to a bar in which you can select how the image is placed on the page and add reflections. I think you would call this a smart bar and this is an amazing feature, which is useful when you are working with limited screen space.
I thought I would try opening up a Word document and to my surprise, you can open Word 2007 documents with this app. So goodbye Word; Hello Pages!
As I said in my previous review, I have never used the iWork application suite, so I cannot compare, but I can say that I love the new Pages. This is by far, one of my favorite applications and I am finding myself using it all the time. It is fast, reliable, and you get two apps in one. How great is that! I used Word for Mac, and I can honestly say I will be ditching Word, and using Pages indefinitely. Pages does simple things better, and I think it is a far better application than word.
There is one more applications in the iWork ‘08 suite. Be sure to check back with us, as I will be reviewing the last application - Numbers ‘08.
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