With new iWork, Apple spotted the problem but declined to fix it

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2013-10-23

I've been a big Keynote fan since the day of its release. It makes the creation of the sorts of presentations I regularly need to do much easier than PowerPoint. It's also generally more stable and less resource-intensive than any of the Microsoft Office applications. For that reason, I've also ended up using the Apple equivalents of the other applications—Pages and Numbers—for a few tasks where Microsoft's offerings are overkill. When not in use, these Apple alternatives sit nicely in the background and use essentially no processing time, something that hasn't been true of the Office applications.

But the current versions of Microsoft's tools are much better behaved now. And with the Mavericks updates to the iWorks applications, Apple has gotten so aggressively user hostile that I'm rethinking some of my habits.

Annoyingly, Apple went astray with what were likely good intentions. If you look at the changes objectively, you can see exactly why they probably were considered good ideas at the design phase. It's just that these new tweaks shouldn't have survived any reasonable attempt at user testing.

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