The Latin question in the title means "What does not perish with time?" The question was asked by the poet Horace, who apparently had had rich experience with Apple software. Apple's software is slick - "slick" in the sense that it contains nothing superfluous. Neither does it always contain what we consider necessary. And strangely, as time goes on, a lot of Apple's software seems to perish.
Some years ago, Apple had a magnificent piece of software called AppleWorks. It was capable of mixing drawing, calculations and word processing and other features in a very elegant way. It had a number of happy users all over the world, so Apple scrapped it. There were probably good reasons for scrapping it. AppleWorks had been written using old technology, and it was difficult to port it to Mac OS X. There was a half working Mac OS X version, but in 2007 Apple finally gave up and stopped supporting the product altogether.
The replacement was iWork, a suit of three programs, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, which had very little in common with AppleWorks. iWork cannot open AppleWorks files and a large amount of data must have been lost when AppleWorks was buried - similar to the loss when Apple had cancelled Hypercard a few years earlier, with no replacement whatsoever.
Pages, the word processor part of iWork was elegant in its own way, completely different from AppleWorks' word processor, and it got a number of fans who tried to use its interesting features in innovative ways.
Recently, Apple took another step towards slickness by releasing Pages 5, a new version of Pages with a new file format and a number of removed features: the customisable toolbar, non-contiguous selections, comment listings in the sidebar, mail merge, style import, internal hyperlinks, outlines, RTF export, delete-copy-paste of pages, captured pages, linked text boxes, a lot of Applescript support, facing pages, alignment guides, vertical rules, and so on.
Each of these removed features is bound to upset some people, who use them.
However, to me it is all good news. A lot of the removed functionality was not very well implemented, and none of it is vital to me. What I want is a word processor that processes text, and with the addition of phonetic symbols (for Japanese and Chinese) and right-to-left support (for Arabic and Hebrew), Pages finally seems to do what I have been expecting it to do since it was released in 2005.
Some years ago, Apple had a magnificent piece of software called AppleWorks. It was capable of mixing drawing, calculations and word processing and other features in a very elegant way. It had a number of happy users all over the world, so Apple scrapped it. There were probably good reasons for scrapping it. AppleWorks had been written using old technology, and it was difficult to port it to Mac OS X. There was a half working Mac OS X version, but in 2007 Apple finally gave up and stopped supporting the product altogether.
The replacement was iWork, a suit of three programs, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, which had very little in common with AppleWorks. iWork cannot open AppleWorks files and a large amount of data must have been lost when AppleWorks was buried - similar to the loss when Apple had cancelled Hypercard a few years earlier, with no replacement whatsoever.
Pages, the word processor part of iWork was elegant in its own way, completely different from AppleWorks' word processor, and it got a number of fans who tried to use its interesting features in innovative ways.
Recently, Apple took another step towards slickness by releasing Pages 5, a new version of Pages with a new file format and a number of removed features: the customisable toolbar, non-contiguous selections, comment listings in the sidebar, mail merge, style import, internal hyperlinks, outlines, RTF export, delete-copy-paste of pages, captured pages, linked text boxes, a lot of Applescript support, facing pages, alignment guides, vertical rules, and so on.
Each of these removed features is bound to upset some people, who use them.
However, to me it is all good news. A lot of the removed functionality was not very well implemented, and none of it is vital to me. What I want is a word processor that processes text, and with the addition of phonetic symbols (for Japanese and Chinese) and right-to-left support (for Arabic and Hebrew), Pages finally seems to do what I have been expecting it to do since it was released in 2005.
