So from my last post I got a comment from Jonathan to basically do his homework for him. To make life easier for you the reader here’s the comment:

So can you give me a full analysis on Word vs. Pages? I’ve considered buying Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Comment by Jonathan — October 19, 2007 @ 7:06 pm

Fear not poor Jonathan, I am here to light the way with my first ever Word vs. Pages totally subjective review. Oh and science has no place here, this will just be a lot of observations and screenshots. It’s best not to ask for things like say, evidence, just accepting on blind faith will make this all go a lot more smoothly.

Starting with my all-time favorite, the Blank Template, Pages looks like this in its default view:

Word? Looks pretty much the same save for the lack of a unified toolbar:

Even though the Word toolbars are annoying as all get out I’m not going to ding them for that. The Word 2008 release is coming in January and from the screenshots I’ve seen this has been fixed. I also feel bad for the Word team at Microsoft. They have this product that has always sold well for them and then Apple goes and changes their processors to Intel AND does so in a manner that anything written in CodeWarrior becomes a huge pain to port. I wonder if Apple poured sugar in their gas tanks too or if they thought that this was enough.

Now Word has this little view tab thingie in the lower left hand corner which changes how the main editing window is displayed:

Choosing the first one gives the default view and the third one shows the full page view. The second one gives this outline view:

I’ve never used the outline view and much to my surprise there was a fourth view, the notebook view. Clicking on it either creates a new document or it transmogrifies your current document into a notebook one.

Considering I had no idea what this was going to do I chose the new document option.

Look at that, it looks like lined paper from a notebook. I guess you’d use this for taking notes or something. Like if you were in class and you weren’t playing with IM/Facebook/MySpace.

Now Pages really only has two modes, normal and page layout. (i.e. The one to create things like newsletters that most people never choose.) You can’t flip back and forth between these two though. The only time you get to choose is when you create the document:

Now I’m a man with a newsletter writer tool in need of a newsletter:

One of the features of Word that I do use a great deal is the change tracking and commenting. You get to it by clicking these icons in the toolbar.

The icons in Pages are so close to the Word ones that you’d think they were separated at birth:

Pages then highlights your edits in this gutter on the left hand side with arrows pointing back into the main text.

I think I generally like how this is done but I’ll admit that I am a little surprised that the changes and comment boxes are square. It seems like Apple generally likes to make things like this a little bubbly.

In contrast this feature in Word is my mortal enemy. No matter how many times I do it I get my inline comment view, which looks a great deal like Pages’ version, into a situation that looks like this:

with all the changes showing up at the bottom of the window:

Then I have to mess around looking for how to change it because I never bother to write it down or take notes or do anything reasonable like that. I’m pretty sure that you have change to full page view to get it to work like I want, only when I did it today:

Figures. I guess that kinda sums everything up though doesn’t it.

For some reason today I got to thinking about word processors. I think it was because during a meeting I started to wonder if Word had outlived its usefulness when it came to writing design documents. Perhaps all design from start to finish could be wiki based? That’s something to ponder but that’s as far as I got since, you know, I needed to actually be paying attention during the meeting.

Seriously, I even made a note on my paper that reads:

“Blog idea: Word templates”

I think that note is actually an accident since I meant to write “Word vs wiki?” but the conversation had moved on and someone had said something about templates. Reading my poorly transcribed note made me think of two things.

1. It is good that I didn’t choose court reporting as a career.

Judge: “Would read back the last statement please.”

Me: “The defendant claimed that the box had fallen off the back of a truck and a roast beef sandwich sounds like an excellent idea for lunch.”

I wonder if you can be held in contempt of court if you were a working officer of the court? Something else to ponder.

2. I don’t recall ever using templates from a word processor.

See look, here’s MS Word and Pages, check out all those templates.

I automatically look for the one named something like “Blank Document”. In fact, all my writing tends to be essay type stuff, I can’t recall the last time I wrote a formal letter. I don’t even know if I own stamps to send a letter. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know how much a stamp costs. That’s probably bad. *Shakes fist at online billpay*

Thinking historically I must have at least written a resume with a template although it’s been so long I don’t remember.

Let’s try it this way, let’s list out all the word processors or text editors I remember using and see what I did with them.

1. Bank Street Writer - I used this in junior high to write many a five paragraph theme. If memory serves it didn’t support word wrapping so I doubt it had much in the way of templates.
2. WordPerfect - This was the main high school guy in all its DOS glory. I also used it in college on some crash-happy Mac Quadras. I even started the VMS version once on the VAX because I simply couldn’t believe that it had been ported to that platform. (Does anyone wonder why they are niche player today?) Anyhow, college papers don’t require templates, they just need ghost writers. Ah, yeah, err, forget you just read that. A ghost writer must have written it.
3. LaTeX - It’s true, I’ve used LaTeX. But it was in college and it was very experimental time. I don’t remember much about it other than it had to do with very complicated and advanced math which I’ve barricaded into a dark and distant corner in the back of my brain. To inquire further would run the risk of letting all that junk out and quite honestly it’s not worth it.
4. vi - Templates? Ha ha ha. Um, no.
5. Emacs - Couldn’t tell you, I gave it up once I found vi. Although I’m sure I could use it to write a lisp macro that would generate templates for me. You know, if I hadn’t found vi.
6. TextMate - Excellent for Ruby on Rails programming but I’ve never used it for documents.
7. BBEdit - Mostly like TextMate with the exception I have a non-eval license key for this one. I’ve typed loads of plain text documents in it but I’ve never needed a template.
8. MS Word - Used it for more documents than I can count, no template recollection.
9. Pages - Ditto.

So there we have it, a walk down memory lane that proves beyond any worthwhile doubt that I don’t remember using word processor templates. This was a fun exercise and I’ll tell you what, this post’s format was spot on. I should probably save so I can use it again, maybe make a template or something. Hey wait…

My senior of college we paid a small fortune every month to have an ISDN line hooked up to the house. That ISDN was then run through a crappy old “Hey I’m a router now” computer to allow four different workstation computers access the Internet, such as it was back then.

Oh yeah, it was a fly setup.

Well, more fly than sharing a modem connection, less fly than cable modems and DSL which didn’t exist in our city yet, and a whole lot less fly than a bank-breaking T1 would have been.

We also had a cable TV hook up for two televisions, one in the downstairs living room and one in the fireplace of the upstairs computer room. I realize that a TV in a fireplace probably isn’t exactly Feng Shui but it did sit in the focal point of the room and bring together the post-apocalyptic technology theme nicely.

Anyhow, I bring this up because the other day at home I was sitting on the couch with one notebook computer while my wife was sitting at the desk with another. Both of us were connected to the Airport and were browsing away when I noticed we hadn’t bothered turning on the TV after the kid went to bed. Thinking back to the days when giving up TV would see impossible (I mean, what else is supposed to go in a fireplace) I had this conversation:

Me: Which would you rather give up, TV or the Internet connection.

Her: TV.

Me: That was a quick answer.

Her: That wasn’t exactly the most challenging question in the world.

Back in the proverbial day trading TV for Internet would have been just crazy talk. I shudder to think what would have happened to the parties that we threw, we would have essentially been hanging a Chateau de Geek sign on the front porch. But today with entertainment like available at your fingertips like this:

Or this:

What Really Happened At The X-Wing Launch - Watch more free videos

…who needs TV?

Yes my geek sign is being built right now, but at least it will remote controllable via a web interface. Oh wait, that doesn’t make it any better does it…

So since I was home and not on the road yesterday I got to see Jesse extract some revenge on the team that tried to send him home. It also turns out that old Jesse is apparently the champion geek of giving massages.

Words can’t describe that one.

It looks like all that time we had him debugging socket and stack trace code came to good use. (Work with me here, he won a massage competition for pete’s sake.)

We’ll have to tune in next week to see if he pushes another team under a bus outwits the competition. We are forced to watch, of course, since he refuses to spill the beans on what happened.

Stupid gag orders.

Something happened to me a few years ago. I’m not exactly sure where I got started on it or what caused it but I became very interested in the topics of productivity and organization. I think it had something to do with having a zillion and six things to do at work and a paralyzing fear of forgetting to do one them.

Since then I’ve been in a constant battle to find the best system by which to keep organized and productive. I’ve talked about this stuff a number of times here before. I even considered writing an application of my own to help me keep it together.

Now a huge influence in all of this has been Merlin Mann. For those that haven’t seen it his Inbox Zero presentation was spot on to an email method that I already swore by, empty out that inbox. Get a drink, watch the video and then starting deleting like its going out of style:

But it was when I first heard him mention OmniFocus on one of the Macbreak Weekly podcasts that I knew that I had found what I was looking for. My requirements, they’re so modest:

0. It had to subscribe to the GTD system or something darn close to it
1. It had to be a native Mac application, bonus points for Cocoa
2. It had to be ridiculously stupidly easy to use

You’d be amazed at how hard it was find something to fit those criteria. Well, ok, maybe you wouldn’t. Chances are you never even thought about it before just this moment. Chances are even better you’ve already moved on mentally.

Anyhow, OmniFocus is from the same guys that do the awesome OmniGraffle so I signed up for the “Pre-release Alpha ‘This isn’t a beta’ it may just eat you computer and your family release.” That was a few weeks ago and I haven’t looked back. Everything that I was doing with BBEdit and some simple text files has been moved to OmniFocus. I have it running constantly and whenever I feel the attention starting to wander (like say, when I want to know how a water tower works) I immediately jump over there and choose the next action for anything.

I mean, seriously, doing any next action you have listed is better than wondering about water towers.

For you Mac folks out there go sign up for the sneak peak. Seriously. Do it now. Why haven’t you left yet? Then buy it when the folks at the Omni Group ship it, it’s worth it.