Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I've been making use of Apples "Pages" program for some personal projects lately. It's a more or less useful application, but one thing that drives me batty: It forces me to enter my registration information every time I launch the program.

Could this be a bug, or a new design decision by Apple to stem piracy?

In other aspects, the program is fairly usable, though a few aspects of it drive me nuts. It is more of a word processor than a page layout program, meaning that it's not very good at filling up a fixed number of pages. The way that it automatically creates and removes pages to fit the content is annoying to say the least. Often, when there are graphics or text boxes placed "above" the flow of text, they whimsically jump from page to page, or sometimes not so whimsically, disappear altogether from the document (and then maybe reappear later as new pages get added).

I do like the instantaneous text-wrapping feedback the program provides as you move objects around on a page. Being able to rotate text and graphics is great. The layout and column mechanisms are fairly intuitive after a little practice. It certainly behaves like a "modern" application. But I am sure it could use a little optimization: occasionally the program gets s...l...o...w even when running on a dual-processor G5. I pity user of legacy hardware trying to do anything complex on this program! Hopefully the Pages team will be motivated to speed up the program as the iPhoto team did.

The feature I would most like to see would be handling of documents with half-sheet-sized facing pages that print side-by-side on the same printed sheet. In such a case, the cover page and the back page would go side by side on the sheet; the inside-front and inside-back pages would go side by side, etc. This would save people the tedious work of physical cut and paste, or, as I'm doing, printing each page to a PDF and then placing the images side by side on a new document sized for a full paper sheet.