Bad Keynot, Bad

I confess that I love iWork '08's Keynote so much that I will often take work home with me so I can use it instead of PowerPoint to prepare presentations. However it still isn't 100% at importing and then re-exporting PowerPoint files, and will sometimes mangle things in weird ways, like putting bullet points back where I removed them, like in this Unix shell script example that I made for a course I have to give in a few minutes:



So I've had to spend the last hour frantically re-editing my presentation. Maybe I removed them the "wrong" way in the first place, I don't really remember. And it looked fine in Keynote when I was editing it there, it was only when I loaded it back into PowerPoint that they showed up. While Keynote is the best software there is for making slide presentations, little things like that are causing me some annoyance when I try to use it in a non-perfect (e.g., PC-bound) world.

Labels: Apple, iWork, Keynote

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.

Labels: Apple, Design, Fonts, iWork