Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Thursday, January 13, 2005
23:06 - Neither fish nor fowl	(top)
In the keynote speech, Steve's tagline for the new iWork suite was "Building a successor to AppleWorks". To me, that pretty clearly says that they don't plan on leaving it at two components (Keynote and Pages). What kind of software suite is satisfied with only two component apps, anyway? It's pretty obvious that iWork is supposed to become a full-fledged productivity suite, with five or six major applications. Most people assume that it's supposed to either be a Microsoft Office killer or, failing that, an AppleWorks replacement; the tagline would seem to suggest the latter, but it may not be that simple. I've said before that I don't like doing predictions; so what I'm going to say here isn't a prediction, but rather what I think would be really cool to see iWork evolve into over the next few years. These aren't even my ideas, either�most have been suggested by friends or correspondents. All I'm doing it saying what seems to make the most sense to me. First of all, we all know about Keynote; the new version is pretty incremental, bringing some new themes, animated text, Flash output, and a few other tweaks and improvements. It's always filled a niche that's mostly defined in the market by PowerPoint. But the second component, Pages, is a word processing app that doesn't much resemble Word or the AppleWorks word processor. What it looks like, to be honest, is a page layout app like a stripped-down QuarkXPress or InDesign, or (as Lance observed) the modern incarnation of Microsoft Publisher. You can write essays and letters just as you would in Word, but the lavish templates and text flow features and image handling and column options make it into something considerably more interesting. With output in well-instrumented HTML (I had the guy demonstrate at the Apple display at Macworld) as well as Word interoperability, and with the same powerful editing and layout tools that Keynote codified, Pages might find itself an indispensable tool for many people in a variety of situations. It seems to be taking a new angle toward content creation that may in fact serve customers in a way we haven't seen before: whereas the high-end page layout applications require huge amounts of training to get users to the level where they're capable of making it do exactly what they want, Pages cuts out most of the really tweaky features and implements the rest in such a beautiful, accessible, intuitive, and fun way that people can create great-looking stuff that's almost in the class of the high-end tools' output. For many users, that may be enough. It's the same philosophy behind GarageBand, where the tradeoff of absolute realism and infinite creativity is made up for by the immediate availability of all those loops which give you almost what you need. If you're good, you can tweak it to go the extra mile and finish the job... but it's so easy and so fun to get 90% there that you hardly need to worry about the other 90%. So that's where iWork stands today: an ostentatious, PowerPoint-trouncing presentation app and a stylish, reaching-above-its-station word processing and page layout app. But we're building a successor to AppleWorks. So what's next? The current face of iWork doesn't look much like Office or AppleWorks. What, then, is it? Well, let's look at what it's not. If AppleWorks is being phased out, Apple is left with two big gaping holes: no spreadsheet app, and no painting or vector-based drawing app. People can use Excel, the unsexy but trusty workhorse of the industry, for spreadsheet duties; it's expensive, but it's hard to argue with. But what about a drawing program? In coming months, Apple will be selling Macs without even an equivalent of Microsoft Paint. For a company staking its name on a range of apps designed to foster creativity, this seems a curious, even baffling omission. I think the next component in iWork is necessarily going to be a drawing/painting program, both vector-based (AppleWorks' claim to fame) and raster/pixel-based, supporting tablet input and antialiasing and layers and all kinds of consumer-level artistic tools, but stopping short of being an image processing tool like Photoshop. (Core Image can take care of most of the Photoshop stuff anyway.) Wouldn't Apple be able to create an awesome drawing app? With a Keynote/Pages-like interface and iLife media integration? Would that rock or what? Next would have to be a spreadsheet app, but I can't imagine that being the centerpiece of a big Macworld presentation. Spreadsheets are drudge work, full of math and formulas and not presenting many opportunities for flashy demos. But unless Apple wants to keep Excel in the loop as a peace offering to Microsoft in the face of a new app (Pages) that will obviate much of the need for Word (though certainly not all), there will need to be a successor to let people do basic spreadsheet stuff. The problem with AppleWorks is that it has a bunch of components dating back to the early days of the personal computer, some of which we have no idea whether anyone finds useful anymore. What about the "Database" component, for example? Does anyone use that anymore? More to the point, aren't most of the functions that consumers used to use databases for (address books, recipes, video collections) today covered by much more specialized and elegant solutions? What use is a Microsoft Access clone in the age of Address Book, Sherlock, Delicious Library, and the Web? And these days, people who need high-end databases can always install stuff like FileMaker, 4D, WebObjects, or MySQL. Something tells me Apple won't be rushing to make a database app for iWork. (Especially once Tiger is out, in which Spotlight turns pretty much everything into a database anyway.) But since the time when AppleWorks was forged by the Progenitors in the age of the dawn of man, some other consumer needs have arisen. Something people are going to need is a full-featured HTML editing application (this one is Chris' idea), one that lets you create gorgeous CSS-laden pages with all the layout elegance of Keynote and all the source-code elegance of the best WYSIWYG editors. Apple can do it. And because Pages has HTML output, and because TextEdit in Tiger has HTML output, I strongly suspect that Apple has written a "Core HTML" engine that any app can leverage to generate excellent and complex Web pages. There ought to be an iWork component, not just a mode in Pages, but a dedicated application for laying out HTML pages with all their unique elements just as Keynote does for projector presentations and Pages does for the printed page. Considering that Keynote 2 has Flash output, this HTML app could even incorporate minor Flash composition tools. .Mac integration could provide simple form-based CGI functionality. With the inevitable abundance of Apple-designed templates and "drop zone" tools for making your own effortless variants on them, this could be a real slam-dunk. So that would make iWork into a five-app suite: Keynote, Pages, Draw/Paint, Spreadsheet, and HTML. Surely the price would climb... or would it? iLife is still stuck no higher than $79, and it's got five mature and quite feature-rich apps in it. But even if it were to sell for $120 like AppleWorks has in the past, I think people would rightly consider it a fine value. With iLife for media creation and iWork for daily productivity, Apple would have a compelling, comprehensive in-house software story to tell�making the Mac not just a platform for the creative, but a tool for getting business done too... just like in the old days.