Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery July 12th, 2006

A few months ago, I did a short usability review of KOffice most precious application: KWord. The report never got finished unfortunately, but I decided to submit my findings in a raw state to the KDE Usability folks nevertheless.

Why I am bringing this up? Well, this got more interesting after I had read an article about Pages, the word-processing application of the Apple iWork suite, on ThinkSecret:

Apple’s Pages software is set to receive a number of significant improvements when version 3 rolls out early next year as part of iWork ‘07, sources have told Think Secret. Among the most notable will be the introduction of two new modes, Word Processing and Layout, that will each be optimized for their respective tasks as opposed to Pages’ current handling of both types of documents with one common set of templates and tools.

Compare this to my findings on KWord (I wrote this on February 19th):

KWord has lots of small issues, but most of them can be easily fixed. The biggest problem is the fact that KWord is aiming for two totally different types of users. A solution to this problem could be introducing “UI modes”. For instance, a “Write Mode” and a “Design Mode”. Switching between should be made easy, and then the mode will represent the UI that is suitable for the user.

I wonder how Apple got their ideas…