Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Apple Giving in to the Beast
Note: If you fail this test, the rest of this post won't mean much to you.
Anyway, I'm trying out iWork '08 at the moment and mostly I like it. Office 2004 for the Mac still doesn't run very well on Intel processors. I can start up a Parellels session, boot Windows XP and start MS Word 2003 for Windows on my Mac quicker than the time it takes for Word:Mac to load on the same computer. So I'm looking for an alternative, and the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is just in 'it's coming' mode at the moment, which leaves iWork, newly upgraded to a brand new version.
Looking first at Pages, the word processor, it seems to give you a pretty nice selection of templates, and actual useful ones as opposed to 50 different greeting cards and other bullshit you et with most word processors. But something struck me, when I loaded up the 'modern letter' template:
Arial???
Apple, Apple, Apple, a long time ago, back in the 1980s, you actually paid for the use of the Helvetica font, and now, just weeks after its 50th birthday, you switch your default font to the bastardized clone that Microsoft paid to have developed just so they could weasel out of font licensing fees? Does this mean I'm going to have to do a "select-all -> font: Helvetica" every time I create a new document? Seriously, the good version is sitting right there in the fonts bar.
I'm just perplexed, is all. Maybe I'll write something substantial about iWork later when I've gotten more of a chance to use it.
BTW, have you heard of all the stuff Microsoft is doing to push OOXML through ISO?
That's one of the things I'm a bit surprised at, that Apple hasn't included an easy export-to-odf function in Pages. Maybe they want to avoid pissing Microsoft off too much all at once.
