I often read comments stating Microsoft is approaching demise due to its over reliance on Office and the fact that because iWorks can read and save in the Office file format the need to use Office is gone. My own previous experience with iWorks wasn't great but as there's so much support I decided to give it another go and see if I really could replace Office with iWorks.

Firstly for the record although my day job is as a .net developer, im also a huge Apple fan and have been for the last decade, so im fairly unbiased towards each company.

Word vs Pages

Being a .net developer my main tool is visual studio, actually using word is not a regular thing for me, my general use is to write specs, documentation and user guides. Features like mail merge or printing labels are things I've never even needed to do once. There are a few features though that I regularly use and need. These include styling text, adding screenshots, comments, tables and using the smart object function to make illustrations.

UI

So first off the UI. Microsoft have done away with toolbars of old and tried to squeeze everything into 1 tab bar at the top of the page. Apple on the other hand have a toolbar plus an object inspector popup containing a lot of tabs.

UI is largely a personal thing but I would give this one to Microsoft. Pages toolbar is good at changing fonts and adding charts but overall I felt like they had just dumped most of the functionality into the object inspector to make the toolbar simple. The result is the object inspector contains a lot of functionality in a small space organised into tabs with cryptic icons rather than words.

Styling text

Both packages have the standard font drop down, bold, underline, colour etc that you expect from any word processor. Apple however have a button that seems to quickly fill a page with Loren ipsum text including made up headings and sub headings. I guess the idea with this is that you then replace the text with your own and the sections are already styled.

Microsoft on the other hand have added icons to there ribbon toolbar that let you select from a predefined set of styles for headings, sub headings etc. They also have a format painter tool that allows you to copy the styles on an existing section to another.

In the styling comparison I would award the category to Microsoft. I personally prefer the quick style links and they have been something I've come to rely on, but there also nicer styles than what Pages auto page fill feature creates.

Screenshots

One of my most loved features of Word is the screenshot button that lets you insert a screen clipping of any open window or select a custom clipping with the mouse. As one of my main uses is to write documentation, this is something I use a lot. As far as I could tell Pages does not have an equivalent feature. The screen grab app must be used to get the screen shot which you can then paste into the doc.

Comments

Both apps support adding comments and in both cases they highlight in nice colours. Word does have a lot more options with its comments compared to Pages which just has add and delete, but this is no real issue Pages does as much as is needed.

Tables, charts

Inserting a table or chart can be achieved daily easily in Pages as can it be in Word.

Smart Objects

For those that don't know, Words smart object feature allows you to quickly create diagrams like a higherarchy chart with very little effort and choose from a set of nice designs. The closest thing in Pages is manually drawing lines and text boxes. For me this is a big win go Word.

Excel vs Numbers

On the whole I generally use Excel for sorting data and fairly basic formulas. Numbers seemed to fulfil these needs without issue, however like with Pages I did miss the ability to quickly style my sheet using predefined styles.

One other major issue I came up against was the ability to connect to a remote data source like a database. Numbers doesn't do this at all, but the ability for me to connect an excel doc to our management systems db to automatically pull in data on current projects is something I ultimately rely upon, without it I would have to constantly copy data from exports.

Conclusion

iWorks is probably a very good set of tools for anyone doing homework or other home use but for the workplace and my needs it falls short. It also isn't the equivalent product to Office. There is a big price different but Microsoft also offer Office web apps for free which is more similar in features. In the windows world Microsoft also give away Office Starter for free which again is more equivalent in features. So rather than Apple have a product that could kill Office as its only £30, Microsoft are actually giving away something just as good for nothing.

Training Buddy is an app that I wrote for Windows Phone 7, intended for anyone who likes Running, Cycling or Walking and would like to keep a log of their workouts.

The app will monitor the route you take along with various stats like speed, pace and how many calories you are burning. During the activity you can set up audio alerts to let you know how your doing and afterwards it will store a log of all the activities you have done for review later on.

For more information on the app visit www.trainingbuddyapp.com or view the app in the Zune Marketplace.

If you're like me you may have gone into design mode in visual studio 2010 hoping to do some work only to be greeted with the following message.

Which initially is a bit confusing, as your site may have just run without any problems. But even so you go to check the placeholders anyway and they look fine. Then you copy and paste the ID's out of the Master Page just to be sure, but still no luck. Check through the Master Page itself and that also looks fine, no squiggly lines to be seen. Finally create a new WebForm linked to the master page, but even this gives the same error.

Now if you have the problem I had, look at the title tag in the Master Page. Does it say <title /> or <title></title>? If it's the first then that's your issue. By default VS2010 will put in the correct tag, but if like me you've just slapped in some HTML from an old project or from a PSD conversion that's been done for you, then chances are you may end up overwriting the title tag as well.

I don't know if I should be happy to now know about this, or just concerned that it's taken me this long to discover. But one issue that surfaces time and time again when programming in ASP.NET, is that issue that pressing enter/return in a text field doesn't always do what you want it to do. 

On a normal website you can have many forms each with their own submit button which becomes the default action when pressing return on one of the forms fields. However in ASP.NET Web Forms there is only ever one form on a page, but there could be 10 different buttons each needing to be the default action for a particular text box. 

The solution as it turns out is very simple and you have two options both introduced in .NET 2.0 (yes that's how old it is!) 

1. Default button for the form. If your page has more than one button, but there is only one that you want to fire when you hit enter then in the code behind you can just type... 

or it can also be specified in your aspx file 

2. If you need to be more specific a panel can also have a default button...