MWSF 2005: Pages

While waiting to get my Keynote 2 question answered, I got a demo of Pages, Apple's new word processor. I had a rather dim view of it after seeing the keynote. Well, let me say this - I came away from the in-person demo much more impressed. During Steve's demo, he emphasized how you could use Apple's templates to make slick looking documents. That's great and all, but templates are usually constraining with their boilerplateness. So, I asked the Apple employee who demo'd Pages to me a series of questions about modifying styles, creating templates, and modifying templates.

And I'm happy to report that it appears to be super-easy to do all of the above. And from what I saw, you shouldn't be fooled by what some in the press are saying -- namely that Microsoft word has nothing to fear from Pages. I would say that MS has a lot to fear. There are some really high-end things that I'm sure that Word does better than Pages. But based upon the kick-ass demo that I saw, Pages may be the first word processor to give Word some competition. Well, other than Word itself, of course. :)

-Andy.