I’ve only played with the latest version of Apple’s Mac-only productivity suite for an hour or so, but these things I know:
- Keynote: I have the most experience with prior versions of Keynote, having adopted it over an increasingly crufty and frustrating PowerPoint:mac about a year ago. I’m excited about the new Record Presentation feature, which does most of the work of ProfCast but spits out file formats a little more useful to me–Flash, PDF, QuickTime (not iPod-specific), etc. I’m also curious to see how Keynote will play into the iChat update coming with Leopard this fall. And I’m not sure how often I’ll be firing up Flash in the future–
- Pages: Pages seems a little more like a word processing app that does some solid desktop publishing, as opposed to the other way around in the previous version. By the looks of things it may be ready to replace Word as my regular word processor. As a little aside, I really could have used the nifty storyboard template last spring. Oh well, maybe now I’ll actually do storyboards for my projects.
- Numbers: I’m a little intimidated, but I’ll figure it out. The examples provided look awfully slick, and I like the idea of marrying data with narrative and design to tell a story.
In sum, iWork ‘08 is a must-have addition to any Mac-using instructional designer’s toolbox.
