I work, you work, we all work, with iWork

I am doing almost all of my presentations with Keynote – and was waiting for Keynote 2 to show up. Actually I am not missing any feature in this application, but I am looking forward to the Flash export and I wonder if it will be easy to do voice-overs for self-running presentations.

What I really would have loved to see in iChat is a way to route the Keynote presentation into the iChat video input so that it would be a snap to do remote lectures. I think there are quite a number of people that would be willing to join a lecture with such a feature.

I don’t have any opinion about Apple Pages yet. It seems to me targetted to consumers “with no sense of style” – so those just need to replace the existing content in the predefined templates. I need to wait reviews to see if that is what I’d love to use. But even though I would not use Pages for my own it seems to have a very slick and simple user interface.

Some have noted there is a table calculation application missing to really deserve the name “iWork”. This might probably be true for most office workers that need to handle data before getting to the text. It is a shame that OpenOffice.org seemed to have no plans for a native MacOS X version (so you need to go with NeoOffice/J from now on).

Update: Dori Smith had a brief look at Pages and says it’s an entry level page layout application and not a MS Word competitor.