Alongside the new iMac, Apple announced new versions of both iLife and iWork. You know what that means, right? You guessed it—it’s massive multipart review season again!

This is the first of a three-part review of iWork ‘08, the latest and most complete version of Apple’s venerable productivity suite. This first part will cover Pages 3.0; the next two parts will cover Keynote 4.0 and Numbers 1.0 in that order. This review will focus mainly on new features to Pages. Please note that the score on this page reflects the score for this application only and not the suite as a whole. Now that I got this out of the way, let’s get started!

Oh, and if you’re reading this article while on a dialup connection (or for that matter, AT&T’s EDGE network), my sincerest apologies in advance for all the screenshots.

Before Pages first debuted in January 2005, I longed for a well-designed, feature-rich word processor that could take advantage of Mac OS X to its fullest possible extent (e.g. OS X’s excellent handling of fonts and text, something that took full advantage of the operating system’s graphics capabilities, etc). Microsoft Word is a solid piece of software, but I still found it to be, well, lacking in certain areas. I went so far as to ask The Omni Group to make a word processor, considering the high quality of their other applications.

Needless to say, when Pages 1.0 hit the street, I was a very happy camper. For most tasks, Pages 1.0 did the job quite well, although it lacked some features such as commenting and tracking changes. Pages 2.0 brought us a number of enhancements, including commenting, mail merge, and searching. Pages 3.0, however, represents the biggest update Pages has seen so far.

Pages’ user interface has received a bit of a facelift with version 3. The most notable changes involve the toolbars:

Pages 2’s toolbar

Pages 3’s toolbar

In terms of appearance, the most obvious differences are the unified toolbar and the toolbar icons. Toolbar icons which were formerly Aqua-esque have taken on a more flat, plastic appearance. Looks aside, you’ll notice a brand new interface element in Pages’ window: the Format Bar. The Format Bar is a contextual toolbar that shows tools pertinent to what you’re doing right now (Apple wisely decided against a Word 2004-like dizzying array of toolbars). For example, if you’re editing text, the Format Bar has tools for augmenting text (font and size, alignment, spacing, etc). Select an image and the Format Bar changes to various graphics-related tools, such as line thickness, fill color, opacity, and masking. The addition of the Format Bar makes working with Pages that much more enjoyable, since you don’t need to have an Inspector window, Font panel, or Color panel open all the time to access the most important formatting options, making Pages much friendlier for small screens (the Format Bar is very compact and narrow). Pages’ user interface was already very good, but the changes made in Pages 3.0 do nothing but bolster the application’s usability. About the only complaint I have right now is that when you have a sidebar active (comments, search, track changes, etc.) you have to click the View toolbar icon or select a command from the View menu to hide it again. A close button on the sidebar would be nice. This, however, is a minor complaint.

Pages is, first and foremost, a word processor. Pages has had the basics down since version 1.0, and version 2.0 bolstered the feature set to a point that most people would be well-suited by Pages for their word-processing needs. Pages 3.0 adds some welcome additions that, well, probably should have been there from the start. Still, better late than never.

Change tracking at work. Sweet!

Pages 3.0 adds—at long last—change tracking to go along with the existing comments feature. Turning on change tracking is as simple as clicking a toolbar icon or activating it via the Edit menu. Activating change tracking spawns a narrow toolbar beneath the Format Bar (similar in size and appearance to Mail’s Spotlight search bar), and adds a sidebar where the change tracking notations reside. Compare this to Microsoft Word 2004 where the change tracking notations live on the page itself. Pages automatically colors change tracking notations by different reviewers differently, so readers can tell who changed what at a glance. Comments, however, are always yellow, and Pages does not seem to allow reviews to use yellow as their reviewer notation color, thus avoiding confusion (though it would be nice to have a better visual indication of who left which comments).

Like any change tracking system, Pages not only allows the writer to accept or reject the changes (on either a per-change basis and on the document as a whole), but also has the added nicety of allowing the reader to show or hide deleted text in the file, which makes it easier to see how the revised document will flow. Additionally, Pages gives the user the ability to save a copy of the revised document as the final draft, in case you wanted to save the original file with the comments and change tracking intact. Nice touch. Unlike Word 2004, Pages cannot compare two versions of a document (say, the current revision and an older revision of a document), and the display options are somewhat limited. However, Pages has most of the bases covered as far as change tracking goes, so unless you rely on Word’s added flexibility, you’ll likely be happy with Pages’ change tracking. Pages’ change tracking feature plays nice with Word 2004 for Mac and Word 2007 for Windows. Exporting a Pages document to Word preserves the change tracking. Likewise, importing a Word document into Pages also preserves change tracking, which will make collaboration that much easier for Pages users.

Also at long last, Pages now includes a grammar checking feature, or as Apple calls it, “Proofreader.” Like other grammar checking tools, Pages Proofreader will catch most glaring errors, but has a hard time grasping a concept we humans like to call “context.” For example, the Proofreader tool caught the following “error” in this review:

While this is technically true, let’s look at the context of the “error:”

This is the first of a three-part review of iWork ‘08, the latest and most complete version of Apples venerable productivity suite.

In this case, referring to iWork ‘08 as the latest and complete version of Apple’s venerable productivity suite would be awkward at best and inaccurate at worst (saying iWork is 100% complete is much too subjective). On the other hand, the Proofreader tool did flag a stock phrase I used at one point in this review, and avoiding such things is always a good move. Oh, here’s another fun one. This is what the Proofreader flagged as an “error:”

This is what the sentence said:

Pages’ user interface has received a bit of a facelift with version 3.

Somehow I don’t think any of the alternatives would be suitable for this usage. The bottom line: you should have a decent working knowledge of English grammar and style before entrusting your writing to any grammar checker tool. It’s great for catching capitalization errors or pointing out a missed comma, but I wouldn’t let Proofreader loose on my writing.

Pages offers three new writing tools. Actually, I should take that back. Pages 3.0 offers one new writing tool, makes one existing writing tool more accessible, and makes one writing tool possibly less accessible.

First the new stuff: Pages now integrates with Spotlight, Google, and Wikipedia search. Highlight any word or phrase in a document and select “Search in Spotlight,” “Search in Google,” or “Search in Wikipedia” from the Writing tools submenu located in the Edit menu to, well, search for the selected term in Spotlight, Google, or Wikipedia. Is this search integration useful? Definitely. I can certainly think of some occasions where I may want to quickly look up something in Wikipedia as I am writing about it. Are any of these search tools particularly groundbreaking? Not really, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to add, say, “Search in Flickr,” for example.

Document statistics have always been part of Pages (or at least since version 2.0). However, Pages 3.0 makes this feature more accessible, again via the Writing Tools submenu located within the Edit menu. However, there is one quirk that just makes you scratch your head: document statistics live on an inspector window tab, and if you have the inspector open, selecting the “Show Statistics” command will switch the inspector over to the proper tab. However, if you have the inspector window closed, the “Show Statistics” command will do… absolutely nothing! That’s right, it will appear as if the menu command is broken! I can only hope that this is a bug that will be fixed in a future update to Pages 3.

Lastly, Pages 3.0 makes looking up a word in Mac OS X’s built-in dictionary perhaps slightly more difficult. The “Look up in Dictionary” command used to be a top-level contextual menu command in Pages 2.0, but it is now buried under the “Writing Tools” submenu. I say that this is “perhaps” more difficult because the command is now also accessible from the Edit menu (Writing Tools submenu) where it was only in the contextual menu before. For those of you keeping score at home, +1 point for Edit menu accessibility, -1 point for sticking such a useful feature into a submenu.

On the compatibility front, Pages 3.0 imports and exports Microsoft Word files, including import support for Microsoft’s new .docx format, used in Word 2007. The Microsoft Mac Business Unit, by comparison, has yet to release stable versions of the Office Open XML file converters. The fact that Apple beat Microsoft to the punch really causes me to question Microsoft’s long-term commitment to the Mac platform, but thats fodder for another article. Fellow Deep Thought writer Liam sent me a .docx version of this document with change-tracking markup, and with the exception of a couple relatively minor formatting problems (Pages doesn’t support drop caps and it handles paragraph borders differently) and missing fonts, Pages did a respectable job at importing the file. Word 2004 files interoperate with Pages just fine, of course. Other supported export formats include rich and plain text, as well as PDF. Pages can send a document to iWeb, but it is lacking a proper HTML export feature. I can’t test the Send to iWeb feature since that command is grayed out for me—I assume it requires iLife ‘08 which I have yet to install. [UPDATE: Sure enough, it required iLife ‘08. All it does, however, is attach a PDF or ZIP of the Pages document to a blog entry, it seems.]

Pages 3.0’s template gallery.

Not only is Pages a worthy word processor, it is a great consumer-level page layout tool. While Pages won’t give InDesign a run for its money, it is very capable when it comes to flyers, newsletter, invitations, cards, or any small-scale page layout task. Unlike prior versions, Pages 3.0 provides more optimization for its page layout features. For example, the template gallery now has separate categories for word processing and page layout templates, including a blank canvas page layout template which does not have the margins of a blank word processing page. In prior versions, the blank template was tailored for word processing.  Additionally, the type of document is noted in the titlebar, emphasizing the distinction made between the two document types.

And of course, Pages 3.0 adds a number of new templates. How could I write a review about Pages and not mention the prerequisite new templates? There’s not a lot to say aside from the fact that the new templates look like something you would expect from Apple: clean, simple, and attractive.

If you’ve used Pages before, you know that it does a very good job at dynamically re-flowing text around an image, so for some of you this is very much a recap. It’s simple: drag and drop an image into a Pages document, select how you want text to wrap around the image, and watch as Pages dynamically rearranges the text around the photo as you drag the image around the page and resize it. It’s really quite slick. Pages 3.0 builds off this solid foundation.

Pages 3’s media browser. Note the totally out-of-place blue background in the source box.

Image handling is mostly the same in Pages 3.0 as it has been in the past. For example, the media library is still here, though version 3.0 now adds access to photos from Photo Booth, as well as video from iPhoto and iTunes. Image adjustment tools in Pages are identical to those in Pages 2.0; it does not inherit the additional adjustment tools that iPhoto ‘08 gained, unfortunately (unless Pages gains those tools if you install iLife ‘08—as I said, I am still on iLife ‘06). [UPDATE: The image adjustment tools are the same even with iLife ‘08 installed.]

For the most part, Pages’ image masking functionality is largely the same as it was in Pages 2.0, though Apple added some completely new features to the mix. The biggest addition is “Instant Alpha,” which makes removing backgrounds in images easier. Simply select “Instant Alpha” from the Format menu, select the colors that you want to mask out, and Pages does the rest. However, getting good results from the Instant Alpha feature can be tricky, especially if the background is gradated and there are reflections involved:

Not so good.

For best results, don’t try to use instant alpha on the entire background all at once; take it bit by bit. That said, even the not-so-good example has a certain artistic flair. Despite the weirdness, Instant Alpha is a welcome feature.

Additionally, Apple added a new type of border for objects: picture frames. These add an attractive, high-quality border to photos or other shapes and objects in your document, giving your document a polished feel. These picture frame border work great on square or rectangle objects, however trying to apply them to non-rectangular shapes—including diamonds—results in some funkiness:

In the future I would like to see Pages be able to recognize the shape of the masking and to adjust the borders accordingly, or additional border styles for varying shapes.

There is one more feature I want to mention: linkable text flow. Linkable text flow is actually a feature in Pages 2.0, but I just discovered it and think it is worth mentioning. If I never knew about it, it is likely that many of you never knew about it either. Say you entered a block of text that fits the text box perfectly. Now say you to drop an image onto the page and have the text wrap around it. No problem so far, except the text now overflows the text box. How does one go about correcting this? You could select the overflowing text, cut it, then paste it into a new text box. Alternately, you can use Pages linkable text flow feature. To use this feature, simply click the blue arrow icon that appears on the edge of the overflowed text box, and click on another text box; the overflowing text moves to the other text box. Or, click on any empty area of the page to create a new text box. As you add or edit the text, the text dynamically flows from one text box to another. It’s a very slick feature and I only wish I discovered it sooner!

Overall, Pages 3.0 is a very good update to an already well-crafted application. Pages 3.0 is a full-featured word processor and consumer-level desktop publishing application. The addition of new word processing tools makes Pages a serious competitor to Microsoft Word for most users. If you require that one feature from Word to get the job done, or are concerned about compatibility (I did not have the opportunity to test Pages Word compatibility as fully as I would have liked) I would recommend giving Pages a spin before buying; a free 30-day trial of iWork ‘08 is available for download. I wouldn’t be surprised if some users ditched Word altogether in favor of Pages. At the end of the day, Pages is worthy of finding its way into Mac users’ Docks everywhere.