Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

It’s hard for me to spend money, particularly on myself.  It’s a hereditary defect that makes me good at accumulating savings but bad at enjoying them. You can imagine, I’m sure, that dropping the cash for a MacBook Pro back in September involved a certain amount of trauma. Already delirious from the magnitude of the purchase, I tacked on a few extra bucks for the Mighty Mouse, which I regret buying, and iWork, which I do not.

iWork has Keynote, which by itself is worth the eighty dollars. Keynote does everything that I could ever reasonably want to do with Powerpoint, and does it better. A big part of grad school is the listening to and giving of presentations, and when you’re under a deadline it’s tremendously helpful when the presentation program goes out of its way to make your work look good. Also, there’s no need to wrestle with some God forsaken grid, which has probably saved me a dozen hours over the past few months.

But let’s not talk about Keynote. Al Gore pretty much has the sales pitch covered on that one. Let’s instead talk about Pages, Apple’s Word equivalent. No, wait. Let’s instead talk about Microsoft Office 2008, and how horrid it is. No, I’m not talking about The Ribbon. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fairly minor change to the user interface, probably for the better. I’m talking about something deeper.

Prior to installing Office 2008, I was using its direct predecessor, which was not built to run on Intel Macs. This made it sluggish, or so I reasoned. I looked forward to a zippy version that was built for my computer. I suppose I should have known better than to associate a word like “zippy” with Microsoft. Office 2008 is just as clunky, if not more so, than the version that came before it. It’s not just the ridiculous startup time. The spell checker eventually gets around to underlining words I’ve misspelled, and likes to keep the underline there even when I’ve corrected things. It once insisted that I was misspelling the word eye, and the red underline wouldn’t go away until I right-clicked the word to make sure I wasn’t having a psychotic break. Writing in Word 2008 feels like swimming through syrup. Its overzealous autoformating is more annoying than ever, and costs me more time than it saves.

Pages, on the other hand, is the Firefox of word processors (Word is now pretty much the Mozilla Suite, remember that thing?). Lean but not lacking for features, Pages never feels like it’s struggling to keep up with my fingers and knows when to just write what I’m typing. I stayed with Word mostly because it’s the defacto word processor of every large institution, but the experience of it has become so irritating that I think it’s time to take advantage of Pages’s Save As Word command.