Re: iWork Pages
Re: iWork Pages
- Subject: Re: iWork Pages
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:20:31 -0400
At 6:49 PM -0600 1/25/05, Peter Bunn wrote:
At the risk of getting my head caved in...
Be brave. We only get so exercised over these things because the
stakes are so low.
I agree *in principal* it's absurd for Apple not to be making their own
apps scriptable.
I think I agree with the "it's hypocrisy" comment earlier in the
thread. If your own dog food is good, you eat it. Solid script
support should be the norm, not an exception.
Yet... hasn't there been something of a 'tradition', habit or tendency
through the years for Apple to deliberately offer selected apps in
'minimalist' form (perhaps directed toward 'consumers' rather than
professionals) so as not to step on third party developers?
I don't think it's that deliberate. It's an organizational thing at
Apple. Take the QuickTime group for example. Years ago they didn't
get AppleScript either. But somehow Sal got them on side, and once
they saw the benefits of it they were sold. Now QuickTime has good
support. Groups at Apple are often isolated, and some don't give a
rats ass about AppleScript. Some VPs, I'm told, also don't have any
time for it. I'm betting it's more to do with Balkanization in Apple
than any deliberate policy.
I mean... SimpleText or TextEdit could easily have been as capable as
BBEdit I doubt it's a lack of talent at Apple that limited either one.
It would have been enough if SimpleText had been as scriptable as
the Scriptable Text Editor that was long ago touted as "the right way
to do it". Apps like BBEdit, Tex-Edit Plus, and Style are real
workhorses. "Solid" scriptability doesn't mean you have to kill the
competition.
Would Smile or Script Debugger exist if ScriptEditor did it all?
Having things like "find and replace" isn't "all". Script Editor
was, for an eternity, so bare bones that it made scripting difficult
for anything even moderately complex. If you're going to do serious
scripting, you need debugging tools. Script Editor just didn't cut
it. I use Script Editor every day, but only for simple things.
Serious scripts need a real tool with debugging capability that's
more than a log. Script Editor could have been a lot better than it
was and still not intrude on the space occupied by other editors.
Would Adobe or Quark continue developing for the Mac platform if Pages
could really compete at the same level?
Personally, I could care less about Pages. I'm a FrameMaker junkie
who wants a serious tool, and since Adobe has deep sixed FrameMaker
for the Mac, I'm looking for a future replacement. It may end up
being LaTeX, but it's sure not going to be replaced by a word
processing toy. It's not that there's no use for AppleWorks, or
Pages, but for my needs it doesn't even come close.
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