Posted August 21st, 2004 @ 01:22am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: Has Keynote been orphaned by Apple?
My Answer: Khoi seems to think so. Me? Well, all signs point to yes. I'm also wondering where in the hell my AppleWorks update may be.
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Posted 21 Aug 2004 at 2:56am #
Maybe I misunderstood Khoi, but I don't think his level of criticism for Keynote is justified. For most people, I believe, Keynote lacks very little. He seems to really push it to its limits, and has apparently found some things like. This is fine, until you claim that because it doesn't work for you, it's inherently flawed (we ran into this a lot on macos-talk :).
Part of the challenge (as FSS knows all too well) is walking the line of addressing the needs of your user base, without building a product aimed primarily at the most demanding, feature-hungry customers at the fringe of the target area. Pursuing the latter strategy can result in a piece of software that makes the simple stuff too hard to find or use.
The reason I love Keynote is that it does not fall into this trap. It does the most common things that applications in its space need to do, and it does them better than PowerPoint.
As for whether Keynote is orphaned, I doubt it.
Posted 28 Aug 2004 at 3:42am #
There are many Macintosh customers out there, just like you and I, wondering where the hell AppleWorks 7 is. It's been 4 years since the last full release of AppleWorks and this has been followed by what can only be characterised as 'maintenance updates'. And the lead AppleWorks programmer no longer works at Apple.
From the circumstantial evidence it does appear AppleWorks has been abandoned. But it also seems illogical. Why did Apple take back ClarisWorks 5 from Claris, rebadge it as AppleWorks 5, supposedly do a 'ground up' rewrite, and then release and patch a buggy AppleWorks 6. It makes no sense.
And I don't believe MS is stopping Apple from releasing a new version. AppleWorks is a Works suite. It doesn't and can't compete with MS Office for Mac. There's room in the Mac marketplace for both a Works suite and full Office suite without MS having to 'get their nose out of joint'.
Very strange.