Apple
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When working with Pages (and Word), it’s hard to get the specifics of embedded images. If you want to know whether an image is a PNG or GIF or what, the interface doesn’t make it easy, as pointed out on Betalogue.
I couldn’t register to leave a comment (*cough*OpenID*cough*) so I’m writing this here post to say: right-click on the Pages file containing the images you want to get at, and click on “Show Package Contents”. All the images are available there as files for your perusal and eventual management. It’s quite handy. Now if only they’d fix the damn file format.
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.
No, I’m not buying an iPhone. Apple won’t let any third-party applications onto the device. In other words, it’s not hackable, and I’m not gonna drop $600 on a computer I can’t mess around with. Apple’s current line on third-party applications is, “if you want the iPhone to do something that it doesn’t do, build a website that does it.” I want to play Ogg Vorbis files, run an NES emulator, SSH into my web server, record lectures, act as a remote control for my PowerBook via bluetooth, and make VoIP calls. None of that can be implemented as a website (at least, not without flash).
I don’t care if the applications that do those things aren’t as shiny as native iPhone apps — I need to be able to decide for myself whether installing a program is worth it or not. Apple didn’t design the thing for people with my priorities, and that’s fine, because that’s what Nokia is for. I got a Nokia E70 a few days ago (the iPhone is driving down prices of other smartphones on the secondhand market), and since then I’ve been a gleeful little nerd.
Photo by Steve Rhodes
Woke up this morning to a bunch of emails asking for the files I used to make my Magritte PowerBook etching. Then got a text message from Julian saying he saw it on Engadget, so that explains it.
Here are the files, in different formats: eps svg ps png
(Don’t use the PNG for etching, use one of the vector-based formats instead.)
It’d be cool if someone made stickers out of them so that people didn’t need access to a laser.
It’d also be cool to see some other artwork. One flicker commenter pointed out that Escher is fertile territory for this kind of thing (though the Apple logo doesn’t tesselate very well). A GigerBook would also be pretty awesome, as would some sort of Adam and Eve reference. Ask an art history major for ideas. If you do something like that, post it to the Instructables project page. Desktop laser engravers are getting cheaper!
Update: Hi Gizmodo, too!
You know what else would be cool? Vitruvian Man, with the Apple logo obscuring the floppy bits.
