The biggest complaints I've seen about iWork is the ways that it falls short of Word. I think this article hits the nail on the head, though, by pointing out that it's not trying to BE Word.

It's really more like iLife. You have a program for your photos, for your videos, for your music...and now one for "anything that you print out, has text, and isn't a business paper or book report."

That's my view of it. Yeah, it won't replace Word for serious word-processing, but it DOES seem ideal for EVERYTHING else a home user might do. And that's a lot of stuff.

If Word is like DVD Studio Pro then iWork is iDVD. Can the larger programs do more? Yeah. But the smaller ones can do it EASIER.

I'm not a Word power user. I have almost NO interest in Words advanced features. I occasiionally need more features than TextEdit, and Pages is just perfect for this. Most of the time, I open word, and I can't find the location for simple things like changing line spacing, and disabling obnoxious automatic features. I open the preferences, and there's a hundred different options NOONe of which I have the faintest understanding of. Pages fits a good niche.

I hate word. I only use it when people send me .doc files for work. I hardly ever have to edit them. The word files I do get seem to work great in Pages, although I haven't tried to send them back edited to my windows using clients yet.

Pages seems to do what I need in a word processing app, and more. TextEdit or TextWrangler do what I need, except for exporting to word painlessly (which like I said I hardly do anyway).

For the graphic design market this is a perfect app. I never write long reports or anything else that uses 90% of word's features, and I doubt I ever will. I think pages will be a big hit for Apple, and with an update or two I am confident it will have all the features that 90% of word users need and more.

Keynote on the other hand I do often use. It is great for building web site prototypes very quickly. With the new master slide features and such I can see myself spending minutes creating working prototypes.

Yesterday I played with the flash export feature, it worked awesomely! It doesn't seem to support flash vectors so I wouldn't post one on the web (the iWork help keynote presentation was 58MB when exported as Flash), but for multi platform presentations and cd-rom demos this is going to be huge.

Well back to iWork for me

Ok, that "book report" comment is way off the mark. If your kids cannot write a "book report" on a consumer-prosumer grade word processor / publishing program, then its not worth dick.

The point here is that iWork is for the "individual" user, hence the "i" in iWork. What exactly that means only Apple really knows, but based on the rest of the "i" Apps, these are applications for consumers and prosumers who simply want to accomplish everyday tasks without the bloated features, headaches, and costs of professional level applications like Word (Office), InDesign, Dreamweaver, or Acrobat (add Photoshop).

Let face it, a truly well designed "i" application should be able to do what most people want 90% of time very well, unlike previous "h" or "home" applications that are simply dumbed down to the point of being worthless to anyone, like most "home" applications bundled with PCs.

If Apple takes iWork development to its logical conclusion, it will eventually be a complete text, spreadsheet, layout, graphics, publishing and presentation suite for "individuals". Not just at home but also at work where some kind of dedicated publishing of is not your primary task.

Let face it, an application that is easy to use and has 10% of the features that we use 90% of time in most professional level applications, would be a "killer app" for the rest of us.

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Small White Car wrote:
... If Word is like DVD Studio Pro then iWork is iDVD. Can the larger programs do more? Yeah. But the smaller ones can do it EASIER.

Currently, it may appears that iWork is iDVD. The fact that Keynote 2, a professional level presentation application, is included in iWork means Pages is positioned in the same class as Keynote 2.

Early attempts to computerize information/document/data results in creation of database, spreadsheet, wordprocessing, presentation and desktop publishing applications. This categorization may not be what SJ had in mind.

I haven't tried the new iApps but from the descriptions here and around the web it sounds like SJ may have an old copy of GoBe Productive hidden on his "comparison" WinTel machine. There were rumors a couple of years ago that the GoBe team went to work for Apple: (actually went back to work for Apple, many were from the original AppleWorks team). So, are we seeing the next paradigm shift: to apps real people can really use?

keynote looks like the perfect presentation app for power users and regular folks as well. the "presenter" dual display feature with slide preview, notes, etc is brilliant..

Pages looks interesting as well, not what I was expecting. acutally what I was expecting was a super-suite (basically rebranded and apple-polished openoffice) combined with mysql. nope, maybe if they would buy Sun they could go that direction...

I just made my first document in Pages today. It took a while to find out how to change features of some of the styles and of course I had to find out what the translations of something things from Word to Pages were, but after that it was all right. If you do a regulalar publication such as a newsletter or something along those lines, Pages is awesome because you can save these graphic intensive templates and have different styles that you can call up on command. However, for the document I created today, it would have taken me a quarter of the time to make it in Word. I don't feel that bad though, because I needed to start using Pages at some point, and this thing had a lot of graphics, so I gave it a go.

Bit I have a question? Isn't it 395 Mb for Pages a bit.. too much? come on! Even if everything is inside a sigle app package it's still a bit too much!!

and the installation does not let you customize languages or other things you might not need!

Another factor that may help this become a hit is the price. I did some surfing and it seems the best price for a stand-alone version of Word 2004 for OS X goes for about $200, and the whole office suite (Office 2004 Standard) for about $300. The whole iWork suite, for what it does, is a steal at $79! I already ordered my copy...

At AppleStore's top sellers list, iLife'05 and iWork rank higher than Mac mini (#6) and iPod mini (#12).