Pages is as proprietary as MS Word in that regard.
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Many (if not most) people that talk positivly about AI think they want a “help me do” tool, where as many (if not most) of the people that are paying to put AI into everything know they want AI to “help me do without those pesky humans that won’t do what I tell them and want too much money”.
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Don’t even get me started on that! I think it’s pretty outrageous that they didn’t “dogfood” their own text system when building Pages. What an opportunity that would have been to update TextKit and make available to developers a first-class word processing framework. But instead of using TextKit, for Pages they created a whole new text system based on CoreText that is not available to developers. Likewise for Notes app. The only Apple app that uses TextKit to the best of my knowledge is TextEdit. Oh, and when you fire up TextEdit, it uses TextKit 2, but as soon as you add a table or switch to multi-page mode, it switches to using TextKit 1. It’s a mess, and one they should have cleaned up several years ago.
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That’s not always a bad thing. Publishing a book used to be very expensive. Thanks to technological innovation, it’s a lot cheaper now. People lost their jobs because of it, and companies closed their doors – and civilization is better for it.
I’m delighted that I can write a book and publish it on Amazon for about the price of a tank of gas. AI is going to bring that kind of access and convenience to a lot of other domains.
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And that’s not always a good thing, either. In the past, a lot of junk got filtered out because the whole process was labor-intensive, involved a lot of materials, storing and moving products around, and thus expensive. So there was kind of a baked-in incentive to gatekeep and be picky where to invest that money. (Of course, that’s also not always a good thing. Especially when publishers play it too safe.)
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I’m pretty tired of moats and hegemonies limiting creative expression. I’m ready to cope with the tsunami of crap, in exchange for gaining my own superpowers.
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Sure, I get that part. I’m just wondering, in simple terms: “Who’s supposed to read all of this?” (Or spend time to find the good stuff to begin with, and then read it). If I remember correctly, the average reading time per day (in the U.S.) is about 15 minutes. Down from 23 minutes two decades earlier. Meanwhile TikTok devours one and a half hours. If those trends continue, there will be more (self-)published authors than readers. Which is great and sad at the same time.
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If a book appears on Amazon and nobody reads it, is it really there?
The problem with publishing is not too few books, it’s too few readers, and the difficulty in connecting books with the readers that do exist.
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It’s definitely a Long Tail/Thousand True Fans situation.
I am not a developer, but a simple user…
LiquidGlass reminds me of skewmorphism debate, am I wrong?
the Windows situation in TextSoftware is the same nightmare?