iWork 05: Pages - dog slow
Today I finally got to see a retail copy of
Pages. I did some tests, and it's a great disappointment. A even bigger disappointment is the quality of the Reviews out there on the net. No full scale review mentions the catastrophic speed of Pages. I tested it here on my Powerbook G4 800Mhz 1GB RAM as well as on the dual 2.5 GHz G5 2GB RAM, so both ends have been seen.
While the general workflow and concept is nice, the speed is unacceptable. The simplest way of seeing this is opening a new Pages document with the "Club Newsletter" template. Try to drag the round flag at the bottom around, then enter text in the middle section. You can literally see the letters form shape, one after one, on both the Powerbook and the top notch Dual G5. WTF? And this is a
one page document...
Next test: importing a standard word document, a 30 page work of a friend of mine with TOC and footnotes. While cleaning up the styles, I wanted to change the TOC. After the tick for every style I got a nice 5-10 second beach ball... G5 was quicker, but not beach ball free. On a side-note: I didn't get the TOC to contain the correct automatic bullets which the headings had. And for developers: this little document accumulated 120 MB additional RPRVT memory... and even after closing all documents, Pages only came down to 100 MB total RPRVT which suggest some leaks as the initial RPRVT size is 8 MB...
If you thought Keynote is slower as it ought to be, Pages exceeds this to the maximum. So a great disappointment. But what really concerns me are the reviewers. I like Apple, I really do. But when a product has crappy qualities, you have to report it. Why didn't they at least mention that the speed wasn't optimal. At least an euphemism like this. But nothing. Does Apple love make reviewers blind? (
MacTeens,
pcmag,
MacWorld). At least some
user sites report Pages speed issues...
P.S.: Keynote 2 for 79$ is still much bang for your buck... so just ignore Pages ;-)
P.S.: comments work again now, sorry for the inconvenience
15:02 - Mittwoch, 9. Februar 2005
Hmm, Pages has some issues, the worst of which (IMHO) are the ridiculous inability to control the spacing between footnotes and the broken hyphenation in the German and apparently other localizations – but at least for the latter problem self-help seems to be possible, if you have AppleWorks 6 (the dictionary and hyphenation files seem to be compatible and just have to be renamed and placed in the appropriate folder inside the Pages bundle).
But speed issues I cannot confirm. (PB G4 12" 867 Mhz with 640 MB RAM running 10.3.7 ...)