Product Reviews

If you saw Alien, you didn't need to watch the sequel. In the first, a slimy extraterrestrial terrorises the inhabitants of a far-off spacecraft. In the second, a slimy extraterrestrial terrorises the inhabitants of a space station. Very similar entities, with only slight improvements to the latter. Now apply that analogy to Pages and Pages 2, and you'll know where we're heading.

It's a shame, then, that Pages 2 is treated as a completely new application rather than an upgrade, so if you're a Pages 1 user and have tweaked things such as your toolbar, those changes won't be reflected. It installs itself in a new folder, leaving the existing application in situ, and uses a new page format so you have to choose to make your documents backwardly compatible.

So if there's a new file format, why didn't Apple use this as an opportunity to switch wholesale to an industry standard such as RTF or Word? Saving in one of those formats doesn't set it as the format of your document, which, as far as Pages is concerned, hasn't been saved at all until you do so in its own proprietary format. Hit command-S enough times and you'll be so sick of the dialog that pops up that you'll eventually give in and use the .pages format for an easy life.

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Not only is this rude, it's also bad practice, as you need to waste more space with a second edition in a universally understood format before sending, otherwise no one will be able to read your work unless they have Pages 2.

There are some points we genuinely like, though. Apple has rewritten the table engine, so it's now not just a dumb layout tool, but a mini spreadsheet with formula and sorting functions.

It also shares Keynote's 3D charting engine, and what we've said about that applies here. To all intents and purposes, it's the same thing, with identical plus and minus points - its sluggishness on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 2GB of RAM being of particular note.

Automatic text conversion will swap (c) for the copyright symbol and full-height fractions to their subscript and superscript combos, but it still won't swap a hyphen surrounded by spaces for an en-dash, which strikes us as lazy. Oh, and the word count still can't count just a selection rather than the document as a whole.

Apple makes a virtue of the fact you can now mask pictures using shapes, but it's clumsy if you're using the presets, and only really works as you'd imagine if you're happy to define your own using the Bezier pen. Likewise, we found that adding a new page to a document we'd already typed caused it to reset our individually honed paragraph styles for the new page, so now we had one document with one style named 'body' that was different on each of our pages.

Pages isn't an application you use, it's one you tame. For every smart innovation, there's an irritating quirk, and by the time we'd finished using it, we were praying that version 3 would concentrate more on smoothing out what's already in place than adding yet more new features. As it stands, Pages 2 isn't an application we feel we can recommend.