I braved the post-effects of the blizzard, heading over to Apple SoHo to pick up a copy of iWork '05. They were out of iPod shuffles, which was good; it saved me $150.

I wanted to take a look at Pages, Apple's just-released word processor. Though I like MS Word quite a bit, I'm not terribly happy with Microsoft's politics, and I'm always looking for viable Word and Excel replacements. These are my initial impressions.

Most shocking: Pages requires a serial number for activation. I don't remember any other Apple product requiring a serial number, though I could be incorrect on this one.

Pages is something like what would happen if MS Word made nice with OmniGraffle and had a baby. Opening a blank document, you can just start typing, like a word processor or text editor. But the document window's title bar allows you to insert a variety of objects, such as shapes, images, tables, or charts. Inserting objects is not as easy as OmniGraffle, but it is far easier than in MS Word. Because Pages isn't as text-oriented as MS Word, it is more natural to stick a box of text next to a graphic; you don't have to deal with flowing the text above, around, or below the image as you would with a Word Processor, and can place objects anywhere on the page.

Pages has borrowed the concept of an inspector: a palette or floating window with context-specific property editors. Inexplicably, though, with the inspector open, clicking on an object doesn't display its property editor or an editor appropriate for the object type. For example, I expected the "Text" editor to appear when clicking in a text box with the inspector open; this didn't happen. You have to manually select the appropriate editor from a list of icons. This took me a while to figure out.

One of the interesting things about Pages is how it handles images in its documents. Once an image is placed in a document, it can be masked, rather than destructively cropped. This makes re-cropping or re-editing a lot easier.

The Pages tour was done using Keynote. I don't know why, but I like this. Also, the built-in document templates are pretty nice.

Pages is nicely hooked into iPhoto. Very easy to place photos in documents, if you keep them in iPhoto.

Pages has most of the standard word processor text features: styles (with overrides), bullets and numbering, columns, sections (with section breaks) and auto-generated tables of contents.

Pages seems to do a good job of importing MS Word documents, and can save documents to MS Word, AppleWorks, HTML, and PDF formats, as well as to its own format.

After having used Pages for an hour, I like it a lot more than I thought I would. Most of the stuff I write using MS Word is only a few pages, and not so memo-oriented, with images and charts. I'm going to give Pages a try over the next few weeks.