December 2007
Pages ‘08 Documents are Incompatible with Pages ‘08
My grad program puts a lot of emphasis on groupwork. Our group projects usually involve emailing Word docs around. It’s kind of annoying, since I use Pages, but I’ve gotten used to it. This past semester, though, I was in a group where everyone had Pages, and I was glad not to have to export everything to Word. Unfortunately, it’s basically impossible to use Pages documents for collaborative editing of any sort.
That’s because Pages documents aren’t files, they’re bundles. Bundles are a special type of directory that OS X knows to treat as a file. Unfortunately, as my group discovered, you can’t email a directory! If you use Mac Mail, your Pages bundle will get automatically zipped, but those zipfiles get flagged as viruses by the UToronto mail server, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that held true for other servers as well. Can’t upload them to an FTP server, either. They’re just completely unsendable, and when you try, you get no explanation telling you whhy. Apple’s only suggestion is to zip the bundle before you send it. Mysteriously, people seem content with this solution even though, as bad solutions go, converting to Word is marginally easier.
This design decision is Microsoftian in its dumbness. Applications in OS X are bundles, which is fine because applications are not meant to be passed around casually. But documents — especially work documents, as in “iWork” — are meant to be opened by multiple people. OpenOffice documents are .tgz files, which have all the advantages of bundles with none of the drawbacks. Is that so hard? I can’t think of any reason why this would be difficult from an implementation perspective.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Pages doesn’t let me edit Word files directly. I have to import the Word file (as an untitled document), make my changes, and export it again. This turned our groupwork into a farcical dance of file conversion. I would write an assignment in Pages and export it to a .doc file so that I could email it to my group, who then had to import it into Pages to make changes, and export it again in order to email it back to me.
It’s a damn shame, because apart from this problem, Pages ‘08 is a masterpiece. It’s the best application Apple makes, as judged by its simplicity and ease of use relative to the complexity of the task it’s designed to perform. I think this bundle issue will keep it from getting the adoption it should. Microsoft gets tons of traction from network effects — if more people are using Word, you’ve got more incentive to use Word as well. But even if everyone in the world switched to Pages tomorrow, we’d still be tossing Word docs around.
The Rising Caffeinated Tide That Lifts All Boats
I was miserably unemployed for awhile after college, and took a drudge job at Starbucks to break the monotony. It turned out to be a really fulfilling experience, so I’ve got a soft spot for them. And now, Taylor Clark at Slate puts some data behind some arguments I’ve been using for years to defend my corporate BFF:
Soon after declining Starbucks’s buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle’s Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. “You’re going to love it,” Stewart reported. “They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.” The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman’s new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. “We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away,” he said.
The article also mentions that, unlike Wal-Mart, they don’t compete on price, so they actually have to make people like their products, which is a depressingly rare corporate strategy. But I also think Starbucks was responsible for introducing the whole concept of “good coffee” to the American conscience, thereby expanding the market for indie cafes. Many people think Starbucks coffee is swill, but I bet the only reason it occurs to them to make that judgment is because Starbucks spent the last fifteen years saturating them with the idea that coffee is something they should be picky about. That’s the sort of meme you can only propagate if you’re a very big company, and indie cafes should be somewhat glad that Starbucks spent the billions of dollars needed to spread that message for them.
I always wondered if my San Francisco location gave me a false impression of a robust, diverse cafe economy in America. I mean, if there’s going to be a Starbucks backlash anywhere, it’s gonna be here. But it sounds like small cafes are doing well anywhere that there’s demand for them. I certainly don’t think Starbucks is perfect (I hang out in indies usually), and I sympathize with anyone who hates the coffee or the cloying ads, but overall it’s a good thing they’re in business.
(via Daring Fireball)