Sunday, October 23, 2011

Does anyone seriously test Apple's iWork products?

I've been using Apple's Pages and Keynote for a few modest projects.

They're functional span is very good and the price is excellent.

Quality though, that's a problem. Once you move outside of the basic functionality there are big unfixed bugs and half built solutions.

I'm somewhat used to this from Apple. Their software quality is only as good as it has to be -- and their customers are notoriously compliant. (Though years of poor quality Aperture releases probably cost Apple the professional photography market.)

I'm used to Apple's poor quality software, but I don't like it.

We're into the Apple 4.0 era now. There are reasons to expect Apple's elegance and share price to decline. i'm good with that. I'd trade 20% of Apple's elegance for better quality products.

2 comments:

Martin said...

Does anyone seriously use Apple's iWork products?

I guess not, at least not on Macs. When was the last major revision of iWork?

I used Pages on a client's request for comments on a draft agreement. The first major issue was that my client used an older version of Pages and my up-to-date version of Pages was not backwards compatible … Pages is proprietary to the max.

(A notable exception is Keynote, probably an outlier.)

JGF said...

I've run into many Keynote bugs too. Numbers has done best of all for me.

I hear Office 2010 for Mac is unusually good, but I have had such bad experiences with prior versions I don't really trust it.