PC users have over time become familiar with some of the Mac Apps like QuickTime, iTunes. While those are both on the Mac & PC platforms some of the Mac-only apps are quite unfamiliar to PC users. And that’s a pity. Take the case of Pages – for me, it beats the pants of Microsoft Word any day for sheer elegance, user friendliness and design quality of output. Ditto with Keynote as compared to PowerPoint. You can read more about what Keynote can do, here.
Take a look at the template options on Pages for a brochure:
And then the counterpart on Word (2004 for Mac):
Forget the eye-candy for a moment. The thoughtfulness behind enabling a professional looking document with ease in Pages, is a winner for me. The output on Word could look like this:
A similar document (without any editing from my end) looks like this on Pages:
While iLife gets the pride of place among Mac apps that are promoted among potential PC users, I feel both Pages & Keynote are under promoted. In business circles, executives turn to PowerPoint and Word almost like robots. If only they could only experience the difference these two can make to their documents (and hence, the impression on the audience). Sigh. It is obvious that a ‘better product’ does not necessarily mean more users. Double Sigh.
1 Comment
Pages is freakin’ awesome man. Office is so restrictive. You can’t get your document to look like what you want it to. Instead you have to burrow through 3,53,637 ‘features’ to get there. The typography, the free flowing elements, and the page layout features just make Pages stunning. Glad to know there are some other appreciators of Pages out there.