Pages 4+

I am a 3rd year software engineering student who had bought his first macbook less than a year ago and was excited to try all the new software that came along. I decided to try pages and see if it would beat google docs as it was the primary document creation software I used. However I can definitely say that I enjoy pages the most out of word and google docs. There have been many classes where I have to write in APA7 style and pages makes it really easy to indent the sources I find, as other software would, in my opinion, make it frustrating to line everything up correctly. With pages I simply press tab 2-3 times and then that specfic line will get a new indent whilst leaving the liens above and below it alone. It does take some getting used too as the UI/UX is different from the other software I've mentioned. However, pages has been the easiest to use in the long run and as all my other devices are apple products, it is extremelly easy to access my documents and share them around. I will say, however, google docs is still superior when it comes to working with other people, as anyone can use google docs for free. WIth pages you have to have an apple product. Pages will continue to be my go to for document writing as for me it has been the easiest to work with, simple, conice, easy to maintain, easy acces and great editing with my other devices.

It isn't common that Apple creates a product that is inferior to their competition. But they have sort of become a victim of their own version of how Microsoft spent the whole of the 1990s in and out of court battles because they put too many locks, blocks, and restrictions on their software for others to partake in perhaps either writing enhancements to Microsoft's outstanding software or, for that matter, write software to work with Microsoft's at all. Apple has achieved incredible success since Gilbert Amelio brought Steve Jobs back ("temporarily") in about 1996 and subsequently with Tim Cook - and the Superhuman and underappreciated Jony Ive, who perhaps should have replaced Steve Jobs since the two were of nearly identical mind. But Apple's mistake is that STILL today, some 30 years after the issue was partly responsible for bringing Apple to its knees, they are no more interchangable and seamlessly cooperative with MS Office programs with their own iWork applications. How do I know? I have suffered professionally over and over and over because of it. Apple, PLEASE PLEASE fix this! You're SOOO sophisticated; please make your software compatible in BOTH DIRECTIONS with similar apps from Microsoft and Google!

Pages is a great user-friendly option as an in-between for a word processor and most design programs. The interface is simple and clean, and easy to understand and correlates nicely with my apple programs. However, some of the automatic defaults are silly and slightly annoying. Having it automatically force objects off the page when they are touching should already be turned off. When most projects have multiple objects, text, and images - it would be assumed I don't want all of them forced off the page when they are together. I think this setting should be automatic. Also - I've had a weird bug where every time I change a font, it takes 10 minutes to load. Plus, a bug where if I move page thumbnails around, it grabs the wrong page! I've had these bugs for a while, so I'm sad there hasn't been a fix because it's frustrating and not efficient to wait another 10 minutes to load a a font and grab the correct thumbnail.

There are a couple of wishlist items that I think would be great: 1. Type on a path. The ability to have text shape onto the arc of a circle would be a game changer. My text wouldnt look so flat and boring. (2) Paste in place. I make a lot of templates and would like a better way to seamlessly have items be placed in the same place from page to page.