I’ve been playing with Pages on the iPad and I think I like what I see! I really love the way Pages on the Mac handles pictures, it simply wipes the floor with MS Word. Pages on the iPad behaves in a similar sort of way but being able to manipulate images with your fingers is tremendously liberating, with so much control and no fumbling about with pointers and suchlike.
Moving pictures or resizing them reveals a grid line helping you orientate yourself and check your alignment, plus the text and images shift and re-flow in real-time so you always know how things are going to look – unlike with Word where changes only seem to happen after you release your mouse button and never land where you want them to.
The iPad keyboard is surprisingly easy to get along with. In landscape view the keys are quite large and it’s pretty easy to build up a head of steam. For a blogger like me, being able to get things down on “paper” when inspiration strikes is really useful. My wife has already made good use of it for taking meeting notes at work.
Pages for iOS is as full featured as many people will need, and for £6.99 it is hard to fault. The form factor of the iPad makes it a perfect accompaniment at work and Pages is an impressively powerful tool for workers on the move.
Now that iCloud has been released, anything you do on Pages for iOS will make its way into the cloud ready to be downloaded when you get back to your desktop. You can also email your finished document straight from your iOS device in PDF format should you be working with Windows-bound colleagues. It’s quite an amazing achievement really.
A powerful, feature-rich word processor for the price of a Subway meal, an integrated cloud service for your files and the ability to create attractive documents anywhere is huge and I’m starting to regret not doing everything I could have to experience this sooner.
Whilst it isn’t ideal, the same features are also available on the iPhone. The smaller screen and keyboard makes for a slightly awkward experience but still very useful in a pinch. It also means that if you forget to take a document to a meeting, you can email it to someone from your phone. I would say print it, but the number of printers supporting AirPrint is still depressingly small.
Potential
So, consider this. You have an iPad with a built-in camera, or an iPhone running iOS5. You are at an event that you need to record somehow. You take photos on your phone or iPad and they are instantly available to Pages through your iCloud photo stream. You can insert them into your document straight away, format it, save it, create a PDF and distribute it there and then. When you get back to your office, your new document is there waiting for you.
Gob-smacked, I really am.
So, why are we doing this task any other way? I want this power at work, right now. None of this Windows XP and Office 2003 rubbish.
People talk about “making savings”, “increasing efficiency” and boosting profits, yet the one thing they never consider is investing in software that makes life easier. They stick with Windows – and old versions of Windows at that, condemning their staff to spending the vast majority of their time trying to overcome problems created by antiquated, defunct software that is ultimately awkward to use.
Related posts:
