“Impromptu is an OSX programming environment for composers, sound artists, VJ’s and graphic artists with an interest in live or interactive programming. Impromptu is a Scheme language environment, a member of the Lisp family of languages.”
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ‘cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
–Joel Spolsky
The Pages program was originally more of a page-layout program than a writing tool. The new version attempts to fix this imbalance with a less artsy word-processing mode. But the effort is only partly successful. It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s. Another example: In Word, to see how many words your document contains, you just glance at the bottom of the screen. In Pages, you must dig down into a submenu to find the answer. The command for showing invisible formatting marks also is harder to find than in Word.
–Walt Mossberg, reviewing iWork.
that there is outstanding.
paging shriram.
Paging the conversation Jeb and I had the other week.