I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for the Pages team: Create THE best wordprocessing app for the iPad. I guess someone whispered in the product managers ears though: “But… don’t REALLY create a wordprocessor !”
Using iPad as a notebook replacement when writing, is a nobrainer.
Except… if you bought an iPad/2 with Pages on it, for writing reports – you’re out of luck.
Getting an iPad 2
Recently, I bought an iPad 2. I love Apple products, so I’m relatively biased towards a positive outlook on the company’s products, I’ll admit.
Of course I had to have an iPad 2. I’m doing an Academy Profession in Business Communication (which might end up being an AP in Leadership, but I digress…), so it’s the perfect tool for me.
It’s light, you won’t break your back. 10 hours of battery. It’s connected. Instant on (no horrible 2-15 minutes before it’s ready). Hook a bluetooth keyboard in there, and you have the perfect little tool for writing reports, taking notes, doing your school work.
Writing blogposts, reviews, rants and so forth, is becoming an increasingly larger part of my life.
Pages is fine for doing those things. So is Awesome Notes, Essay (in which this is drafted), Evernote, Springpad, and a whole other bunch of apps. Actually, every app mentioned here, is way BETTER than Pages for writing that kind of stuff.
Except for those damn schoolpapers and reports.
Disappointment smacks me in the face
When I fired up Pages for the first time after buying my iPad 2, I was hooked. I sat there thinking “this will do wonders for how much I’ll be writing – fan-friggin-tastic !”.
I started out doing notes for my exam (which is up June 7th – Organizational theory). I found Pages actually had an advantage over every other notetaking app I’ve seen so far: When I saw a model in my book, that I needed to include with my notes, I took a picture of it with the built in camera, rotated and cropped the image in Photoshop Express, back into Pages – and included the finished picture in my notes.
Do you have any idea how awesome that is ? That means “No more trying to describe a model with words ! Snap, rotate, crop, include – the picture says more than a 1000 words.”
Sure, you can have pictures in (some of) the others as well. But let’s take Evernote: It attaches your picture to the note. It doesn’t include it next to the text, allowing you to link your own notes to the model.
Notes done. On to the term paper.
And then, massive disappointment hit me.
See, when doing academic term papers there are some basic rules:
- You HAVE to have an index to show where which text is (hey, it works for books too, it’s a pretty damn nice concept
).
- You also have to provide footnotes. Which isn’t an unreasonable thing to include in academic term papers. “What I just wrote here, is written about in the theoretic material, on page this, in book that, written by Mr. Blabla”. It validates that what you’re writing, did not just pop out of thin air (at least not your own thin air).
Pages does neither.
Effectively rendering Pages useless for actual report/term paper writing, as well as the biggest wordprocessing tease in history.
Which, in turn, and if I wasn’t such a big Apple fanboy (ok, and because I use my iPad 2 for a plethora of other tasks), would make the iPad 2 a DKK 5.999,- writing brick.
Seriously. The ONE thing Pages has going for it, is including pictures in the document.
Don’t get me wrong – you can do all of the other basic wordprocessing stuff in Pages. But I didn’t buy Pages for taking notes, since it’s easily beaten by a lot of the existing notetaking apps. I bought it for Wordprocessing. In which Pages excel in formatting text. Which other apps do as well (Essay, Awesome Notes, Evernote and Springpad all let you do basic formatting, just as fine as Pages).
But I can’t use it for real wordprocessing tasks. I can’t use Pages as my main writing tool. I can write prettily formatted content using Pages, but I can’t get the job done, using Pages. I have to export what I’ve written, and finish that off in Word. And once I’ve gone the Word way, I dare not edit the document in Pages again, in fear of somehow corrupting the document. And also because once I have the indexes and footnotes, and have gone the real wordprocessing way – Pages simply lose both purpose and attraction.
Summing it all up
Pages lets me do basic wordprocessing. It does not let me do the things I need to do, to be able to fully produce a finished document I can submit to my teacher, a customer or anyone else expecting a proper document.
However, for notetaking, there are LOTS of other better apps, which sync with various cloud services, and which also have a way better way of organizing the notes. And let you do a lot of the basic formatting tasks you can do in Pages.
Pages is great for notes, because it lets me include pictures I can take with the iPad 2 camera. That’s the one thing it has going for it.
Pages isn’t great for notes in any other way.
On top of that, Pages isn’t great as a wordprocessor either – it gets you 90% of the way. Problem is, the last 10% is what would set Pages apart from the competitors.
Instead, you end up where Pages isn’t really the best solution in either situation. It’s a very, very frustrating experience. And I expect GREAT experiences from Apple, that’s what I’m accustomed to.
Conclusion
Pages is a beefed up notetaking tool, with very limited sync options, and no real organizing features to speak of, for your notes.
Or, it’s a horribly disappointing and useless wordprocessing app, where the best feature is including photos alongside your text. A wordprocessing app which almost gets you there, but frustratingly stops you short of the goal line, waving the Finish flag, but never lets you near it.
It’s DKK 59,- wasted.
Better alternatives
Go buy one of these instead, write all you can write, and when you feel it’s done, use a real wordprocessor on your Mac/PC to set it up and format it properly:
- Notability (My new favorite note taking app !)
- Essay (Fantasticly simple and beautiful UI)
- Awesome Note HD (Allround goodness)
What about you ? What do you use for writing documents on your iPad ? Is there in fact any proper solution for producing well formatted documents on an iPad ?
Or, do you use a completely different solution ? Leave a comment if you know of any better alternatives.
