iWork 09: My New Toy

You know, at the risk of sounding like a giant advert — and when did I never risk sounding like a giant Apple advert — I’ve got to admit to that I’m thoroughly enjoying the job, so far.

No, seriously … !

One thing I do know … ?

Is that the shopª I work at — as well as offering a nice healthy staff discount — is one of the few places outside of an Apple store to sell Apple software.

You can imagine, can‘t you … ?

One thing I know I’ve have managed to treat myself to … ?

Is a copy of Apple’s iWork 09 productivity suite.

Now, granted, it’s a couple of years old, now: but, to be fair … ?

I’ve not — staff discount or otherwise — had the money to actually buy a copy, ’til now.

And have usually found NeoOffice — the open source suite I’ve preferred to use — good enough.

So you know, Apple published the original version of iWorks — iWorks ’05 — some five years ago: it’s their equivalent of the Microsoft Office suite.

Or possibly Microsoft Works suite …

Which is possibly an argument for another time.

At any rate, the version of the iWorks suite that I’ve bought includes word processing software — Pages 4.0 — a presentation application — Keynote 5.0 — and last, but not least, a spreadsheet app: Numbers 2.0.

The only one of which I’ve used, so far … ?

Is Keynote.

One of the handy features of Keynote — or, at least, the one that appealed to me — was Keynote’s ability to export a given slideshow to Apple’s Quicktime .mov format.

Basically, what I’ve done is to use Keynote to turn tomorrow’s Teaser into a very basic movie presentation.

And I think it’s a better looking one, than the screen recordings of the text being read out in iTunes.

Knowing that Pages could not open .odt files* — the open source file format that I usually write the Teasers in, using Bean or NeoOffice — I used Bean to open tomorrow’s teaser and cut and pasted the relevant bits of text into various slides: creating new slides as needed.

And based on my brief experience, Keynote was a joy to use: new slides could be added with a simple keyboard combinationº, filling in the slides with some text — and adding a few sound effects, shapes and pictures — was easy and saving and export to a movie, done at the drop of a hat.

From where I’m sitting … ?

And sad case that I am, blogging on a Friday night … ?

I’ll be looking forward to trying Pages …

* A possible flaw, as far as as I’m concerned: I’ve relied on NeoOffice, Bean and OpenOffice.org — and TextEdit, the on-board OS X text editor — for many years, all of which use the .odt file as either their default file format or are capable of opening and saving in the format.

º ⇧, ⌘ and n, so you know.

ª OK, CeX make their money by buying and selling second-hand mobile phones, games consoles, laptops, desktops and all the things you’d expect to go with them. However, they also get hold of excess stock that other retailers can’t shift: which includes Apple software, and sealed copies of Windoze, if that shakes your tree. I’m not complaining: I’ve never had the money — or completely been comfy with online buying —before now.