Pages for iPad | Mobile Word Processor From Apple

I tell you what, Pages for iPad is the bee’s knees. I listened to Apple execs tell us that the iPad would fulfill most people’s computing needs in the future, and I quietly doubted just how soon that would happen until got my hands on this app.

If you’re new to the world of Apple-designed software, Pages is the company’s word-processing software for Mac (and now iPad). It can’t do everything Word does – it’s aimed much more at consumers than Word is – but everything it does do it does extremely well. Letters, resumes, thank-you notes and cards, newsletter, proposals, reports, term papers, even posters and flyers…. These are the kinds of things that Pages for iPad does well, and it makes doing them on the iPad pretty darned easy.

The key to this competence is the effort Apple put into reworking the user interface. They didn’t try to shoehorn a desktop app into the iPad; they built the app from the ground up to be a word processor with a touch interface. This was one of the first iPad apps released, and I think Apple really wanted to show other developers what could be done. The result is that (thanks to some great use of gestures) you don’t need a mouse. The app is intended to be used with pinches, zooms, swipes, and multifinger gestures, and I’m here to tell you that this is important for making it work well on the iPad.

The other key ingredient is that Apple made context king. The tools that are available on the screen depend entirely on what you’re doing or have selected – and that keeps the app from becoming cluttered. When you’re working on your document, the iPad’s screen real estate is filled with that document, and not whit a lot of tools and palettes you’re not using.

At the top of the screen is a menu bar. You have a button for accessing your documents (or creating new ones), the Undo/Redo button, the title of the document you’re working on, and some tools for manipulating text and object. The “i” button has specific controls for manipulating whatever you’ve selected. If you’re typing, it will have style, List, and layout options. If you select an image, it offers style options and ways to manipulate the image (such as flipping or aligning it). If you insert a chart, it gives you controls for the chart. It made instant sense to me on first use. The landscape button next to it allows you to add objects to your document. Photos in your library, tables, and shapes are all no more than a couple of taps away. The little wrench offers access to the in-app Help system and documents-setup controls (margins, headers, footers, and such); the double-headed arrows gives you a full-screen view of your document.

One of the coolest things about Pages for iPad is the way objects work. Once you drop, say, a photo, you can move it, resize it, change the style, or even rotate it, and the text will just auto-flow around it in real time. It makes layout and design so easy to do that you may have to try it to truly appreciate it.

The app comes with 16 templates that make all the things I listed above even easier. You can share files via e-mail and with Apple’s free iWork.com account. You can export a file as a Pages, Word, or PDF file. Whether you need to work on your files on the go or just want to use your iPad for some common tasks, Pages is an awesome app. I even typed up this review on my iPad with Pages.