buy iWork

I have little use for Keynote, although I hear it is quite well made, far preferable to Powerpoint.

Pages on the other hand is amazing, given its first-version status. I already use it, and can’t wait to see how it grows in iWork ‘06.

I finally bought iWork and I think that I will use it a lot. I want to standardize and simplify as much of what I do in my teaching and I think that this will help a lot.
I love how both Pages and Keynote are simple and clean. The design of the programs seem to focus you on what is important. Now I have to start to move beyond the built-in templates and make my own.

$79 is price to escape the bloatware known as Office. I use Excel only occasionally. I’m not so down on MS it’s just slow and not “OSX-like” enough for me. Pages templates are sweet. I’m planning to move some PPT presentations to Keynote now that it’s been so overhauled from version 1.x

Well I bought iWork the other week. Have mixed feelings about it though.

On the one hand Keynote 2.0 is excellent. The themes have expanded, media integration is good and the app runs faster than the older version.

Pages though is a different story. It seems to be very memory intensive, is not so hot if you want to do anything other than follow the templates (good if you’re a luddite; not so good if you delude yourself to be a power user!(no prizes for guessing who I think I am! Deluded? Definitely.)), and is not as cross platform as The Fruit would have you believe. I think it will eventually evolve into something quite impressive, but not this year.

I’ve been using Keynote for a year now and I really like it. I still haven’t made my own theme (but that’s another thing to do), but now that Keynote 2 is out along with the amazing looking Pages, I think that I will get iWork to have both. Now I actually use TextEdit to create handouts as it lets me save styles. I do miss having more control over things and every time I use Word it is frustrating. With Pages designed by the Keynote team, I think that I will use it a lot.