Pages and Importing Word Documents
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 29, 2005 2:21 AM EST- Posted in
- Anand
Ever since I got iWork I've been importing as many Word documents into Pages as possible to figure out what will and won't break it. Up till recently things were looking quite good, but one of Vinney's law documents wouldn't import at all and I'm not certain why. I haven't had time to look through it and pinpoint what it was that broke it but the fact that there is at least one document out there that wouldn't import at all is a little disappointing. From what I can tell the document itself didn't use any fancy Word features, it was just a normal Word doc - but I'll dig deeper soon. For what it's worth, TextEdit opened it just fine.
The rest of the documents I've imported all work fine, except sometimes I'll get a font doesn't exist or character shading not supported warning, but nothing else major.
I realized I hadn't timed the installation of iLife '05 on the mini, so I decided to do that today - 23 minutes. That's 23 minutes for the actual installation portion of iLife on the mini - Apple needs to ship these things with iLife '05 preinstalled asap. Of course I'm talking about installing a 4GB application suite from DVD onto a 2.5" laptop HDD, but still :)
That brings me to another point - having applications and games shipping on DVDs, I can't even begin to describe how great it is to install everything from DVD. I think this is actually a smaller part of a much larger story though. The early adopter nature of the Mac platform is something that can definitely appeal to the enthusiast PC buying population. I can't even count the number of times that I wished floppies would go away, or that we'd do away with parallel/serial ports on motherboards, but the problem always ends up being backwards compatibility for the masses. A platform built almost entirely around early adoption is quite appealing to the PC enthusiast in me, I just don't think Apple has done a good job of actually marketing to that group of people.
I was thinking about this the other day - it wouldn't be too difficult for Apple to put together a box that would actually suit the needs of the PC enthusiast (other than the mini), they would just have to actually put the time into doing it. A user upgradable G5 - offer CPU upgrades, allow for custom SPD programming on memory modules so that users can use whatever memory they'd like (although offer a default setting that will reject all non-Apple approved memory) and the HDD/storage upgrades are already pretty much covered. Throw in a handful of overclocking options (and if Apple did it we'd probably actually get a good interface for once) and obviously do whatever it takes to target a lower price point. Even throw in a flash upgrade kit to convert PC video cards to work on Macs, something that end users could flash on their PCs - after all, the PC versions of Mac video cards are generally cheaper anyways. It's wishful thinking but it is a way to address a community that I think would be very appreciative of some of the features of the platform.
At 2:20AM on a Saturday morning - it's back to work for me :)
Take care and enjoy the weekend.
The rest of the documents I've imported all work fine, except sometimes I'll get a font doesn't exist or character shading not supported warning, but nothing else major.
I realized I hadn't timed the installation of iLife '05 on the mini, so I decided to do that today - 23 minutes. That's 23 minutes for the actual installation portion of iLife on the mini - Apple needs to ship these things with iLife '05 preinstalled asap. Of course I'm talking about installing a 4GB application suite from DVD onto a 2.5" laptop HDD, but still :)
That brings me to another point - having applications and games shipping on DVDs, I can't even begin to describe how great it is to install everything from DVD. I think this is actually a smaller part of a much larger story though. The early adopter nature of the Mac platform is something that can definitely appeal to the enthusiast PC buying population. I can't even count the number of times that I wished floppies would go away, or that we'd do away with parallel/serial ports on motherboards, but the problem always ends up being backwards compatibility for the masses. A platform built almost entirely around early adoption is quite appealing to the PC enthusiast in me, I just don't think Apple has done a good job of actually marketing to that group of people.
I was thinking about this the other day - it wouldn't be too difficult for Apple to put together a box that would actually suit the needs of the PC enthusiast (other than the mini), they would just have to actually put the time into doing it. A user upgradable G5 - offer CPU upgrades, allow for custom SPD programming on memory modules so that users can use whatever memory they'd like (although offer a default setting that will reject all non-Apple approved memory) and the HDD/storage upgrades are already pretty much covered. Throw in a handful of overclocking options (and if Apple did it we'd probably actually get a good interface for once) and obviously do whatever it takes to target a lower price point. Even throw in a flash upgrade kit to convert PC video cards to work on Macs, something that end users could flash on their PCs - after all, the PC versions of Mac video cards are generally cheaper anyways. It's wishful thinking but it is a way to address a community that I think would be very appreciative of some of the features of the platform.
At 2:20AM on a Saturday morning - it's back to work for me :)
Take care and enjoy the weekend.
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CompuNinja - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Aristotle,Cute, but utterly silly. My 200 page thesis was only 875 kb with figures. I don't believe I've ever written a document that was 1 MB. And no, I didn't want a 100 MB disk that was going to run me $30-50 per disk, I wanted to put my files on a floppy disk that I got for <$1, and that I had many of.
At the end of the day I had to email it to my roommate, who then copied it onto a floppy for me, which I could then print out.
If technology is going to be cut out then it has to have something ready in it's place to go with. Apple has a history of just cutting and running, and I got the short end of that stick.
Chuckles - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
Anand:The G4's Towers all were user upgradeable, the processor came on a daughtercard that plugged into the MLB. There are aftermarket CPU upgrades available, but due to the market size, they are pretty pricey. As far as I can tell, the G5's are built using a similar daughtercard, which allows for user upgrading, as soon as the daughtercards are available.
Overclocking on a Mac is like early PC overclocking, haul out your soldering iron and play with resistors (and kiss your warrantee goodbye).
msva124 - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
>And the whole point of this is to get OS X into the hands of more users, of very influential users, not to take that out of the equation.If I am interpreting this correctly, you are more or less saying that your goal is to influence peoples' choice of operating system in favor of OS X. That is certainly a valid opinion, but less objective than I would hope for considering this product is not measured in terms of hard data or benchmarks. If your goal is instead to give people a chance to see what else is out there, I am puzzled as to why you have not yet promised reviews of KDE, or a Linux Distro. These would also seem to be valid alternatives to Windows while at the same time not costing $499 to the typical PC owner. Perhaps they are not valid alternatives? Please show us why or why not.
If you really do think OS X is the best computing platform for the average user, and not merely your personal preference, please provide some data to back this up. This is not impossible or expensive, it just must be tested in creative ways that are different from measuring FPS. There are hundreds of credible sites out there stating "my personal experience with OS X is that it is better than Windows". Unless you do something to differentiate yourself from these other places, perhaps by providing some sort of evidence that the majority of average users will agree with your conclusion, you are detracting from the scientific nature of this site.
Mark Little - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
Here, here Anand!I dislike those of us who try to keep old technologies around forever because they won't be bothered with learning something. I worked technical support in Miami for awhile and I had this guy call in asking about the free 28.8 modem pool for access to a VT100 (I think that is right, it's been a long time) dumb terminal that supported Lynx and Pine mail. That stuff was cool back in the early 90's but this was in 1999 almost 2000!
PC users need to move on faster. We need to show hardware companies that backwards compatibility is only needed up to a certain point. We don't need PS/2 ports, serial connections, parallel connections and IMHO, floppy drive connections. It took forever to kill off ISA, I'm sure it will take even longer to get rid of PCI. How long will we have to wait for motherboards with no PATA connections? Serial ATA is so much better (although some of the blame is with OS developers that don't provide updated interfaces to install the OS - it takes so much work to install Windows on a SATA drive because the install utility doesn't search these devices for drives).
With regards to your ideas about a user upgradeable Mac, well right now that is called the PowerMac G5. I don't know if we will get any better than that for awhile. But I came up with an idea that may allow a lower end PowerMac with more upgrade opinions. Apple needs to push IBM/Motorola/Others to come up with a Power hungry performance (Pentium 4, Athlon 64) and value (Celeron, Sempron) G5 processor. They also need a power efficient performance (Pentium M) and value (no equivalent yet) G5 processor. That way, we might be able to get towers down in price with more end-user upgrades.
Just a thought.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
CompuNinjaWhile I agree with your statement, the problem is that if we don't embrace new technologies earlier the older, inferior ones tend to stick around a lot longer. Remember how long it took to get any USB peripherals on the PC side? And how about the floppy - even today we don't have Windows based BIOS flash utilities shipping with all motherboards.
As far as me dreaming about Apple building an enthusiast box, I think some of my intent may have been misinterpreted. The idea isn't to turn the tables on Apple's business model since their cashflow clearly indicates that it's working (at least for the time being). The idea instead is to offer a machine that is necessarily more difficult to setup than the current Macs to serve as a barrier to entry, but potentially act as a point of attraction to the PC enthusiast market - quite possibly Apple's biggest critics and also the technology users with the greatest influence. Things like the overclocking options would be optional and once again since we're catering to a user base who is familiar with them, rely on the same type of common sense support that exists presently - if your system crashes, don't tweak as much. And the whole point of this is to get OS X into the hands of more users, of very influential users, not to take that out of the equation.
The mini, in my opinion, was a great move to get more exposure to OS X - the fact that a number of people in the PC enthusiast community seem to also be interested in it will be a very good side effect for Apple. The problem is, as I mentioned in my past Mac articles, that we are quite critical creatures and in order to be sold on OS X it needs to be experienced as perfect as possible - that means no choppiness or slowdowns (re: 256MB standard memory configuration and 32MB local GPU frame buffer). While I do hope that people will configure the mini with more memory and realize that Exposé won't be smooth as butter at higher resolutions, I would like to see people give OS X a try on faster hardware - I'm simply trying to come up with ideas to enable that.
Take care,
Anand
Aristotle - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
#11 "$120 to buy some SuperDrive crap just to put my file on a floppy"So while your fortunate PC brethren in spirit were easily able to zip and split their theses into little 1.4MB chunks to write to multiple floppies, and then concatenate them at college every time they wanted to look at them, poor unfortunate you had to copy to a single 100MB zip disk. My heart bleeds for you.
CompuNinja - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
RE: early adoption and floppiesI was one of the suckers that bought the original iMac when it first came out and it didn't have a floppy drive. It also did have a CD-Burner, and there weren't those nice little things called USB flash keys. So guess what happened to me when I had to take a file from my computer to the computer lab? I had to spend $120 to buy some SuperDrive crap just to put my file on a floppy. Because Apple was so far ahead of the curve, that's the only external floppy drive I could get. No one else had started to bother. Great for me, right?
So no, Anand, it's not always the smartest move to just up and drop support for a piece of hardware that's standard among all computers if you don't actually replace it with something that serves the same type of function.
xype - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
Great idea! And in _no_ time, you'd have people calling up Apple support why their cheap video card died when they tried to flash it, have users call up when the system acts wanky after the "sysadmin" installed some weird RAM modules and changed the settings or try to explain a 16 year old why he _can't_ have _another_ G5 CPU module in exchange for his fried one.I wonder _why_ Apple hasn't tought of that, yet.
argod - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
Anand,You may want to watch demo of NeXTStep 3.0 given by Steve Jobs
from 1994.
http://www.openstep.se/jobs/
Endymion - Saturday, January 29, 2005 - link
I guess the mistake Apple made was to believe that only people wanting to buy a tool would want a computer. There are a lot more tinkerers than creative people.There is no need to reinvent Wintel - it already exists.