The rest of your post speaks for itself. But I do take issue with…
Are you now giving me license to disparage the Terminator series? I went out and bought the whole thing and now the kids force me to sit through it on a regular basis. There is a bit there that really gets under my skin.
As to Star Wars … thank God Shatner was not tasked to destroy this one as well. What the heck went wrong in Lucas’ dim little cranial cavity when he “re-released” the original with not so original footage? I don’t give a rip what you intended, but leave my childhood alone. At least make it possible for me to show my kids what I experienced and started me on a sci-fi/fantasy trip that Snort hopes will end soon (dear, it hasn’t ended in 30 years, consider it a lost cause). And while I am at it …
Umm … I guess there is a little latent anger here. Let’s move on shall we?
I’m happy to sit on the fence on this one. I agree with Keith, that in all probability, the majority of Mac users – other than those who have simply grown up in families which were Mac orientated – have done so because they have wanted an alternative, and so may be considered possibly a little bit more savvy.
On the other hand, I agree with Jaysen that Apple are trying – in many ways mistakenly as far as I’m concerned – to simplify things, for users by providing ready-rolled solutions to everything, all those infernal “professionally-designed” templates … just drop in your words/images/whatever … and you’ll have a document that anyone in the know will look at and say “Ah yes, Apple whatever.app, XX template.” And I’m glad to say, to pick up a point from earlier, that I use GyazMail which I think is much better than Mail.app and which only sends mails as plain text! I loathe the styled mails that so many people seem to think cool.
I think a classic example of this simplification process is iMovie. iMovie HD is a much better app, giving you more control and possibilities, than iMovie as part of iLife 08 … but then I think part of the problem was that there wasn’t enough technical space between iMovie HD and Final Cut Express, so who would lash out on the latter when the former was free and nearly as capable!
As for Pages, I wish I could cut out all those templates and save the disk space, and yes, proper RTF handling would be really good, but.
Just to weigh in on the positive side for Pages, I’ve been printing out the innards of my books quite happily from Pages, and last night I had to re-do the layout for one of the covers. I originally did it in InDesign, which I don’t have on this computer, so this time I did it in Pages. It was easy, and it looks great.
I can do everything in one program? Great!
I haven’t written a book using Scrivener yet, so I haven’t tried to do any back-and-forth with files. But I think by the time I’ve compiled the project into a draft, I’d be finished ‘scrivening’ and would just stay in Pages.
That’s how I’m using it for my copywriting: once I’ve compiled a document and sent it to my editor, any changes she or I make will really need to be done in the context of the whole piece; thinking in sections is more useful in the composition stage.
Hi Hamish - I agree, and that is how Scrivener is intended really anyway. For most books this is fine; the only trouble comes if users have books which contain images or footnotes that they want to export from Scrivener and get into Pages. In that case, they’re out of luck - there is simply no way of getting footnotes and images from Scrivener to Pages without using a third program as an intermediary.
In case it helps anyone, I have been able to preserve footnotes in an RTF document when importing into Pages '08. The RTF was generated by Nisus Writer Pro. The trick was to open it in MS Word, save it as a Word file, then import it into Pages, and the footnotes survived the import. FYI I cannot remember whether I had saved the Nisus RTF for “Word” (in Nisus) before importing it into Word, but you could try it both ways. So if you want to try to preserve RTF footnotes when importing into Pages, try: RTF—>Word---->Pages. Better than nothing I suppose.
Yes, this is the only known workaround for the issue. We were also suggesting NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org, as they can both save proper Word files without the heavy expensive of Microsoft Office, for those who do not have it.