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The bitter taste of failure doesn’t necessarily result in your own shortcomings. Tasting someone elses failure can be really gruesome especially if you expected more from them. No one is immune to failure but everyone can take measures to prevent a repeat performance.

There are just a few things in life that will happen and my default response is to flat out quit. One such event happened today while I was using Apple’s Pages program. (Part of iWork ‘08) I was doing some very iterative thinking on a new project. I was spinning in lots of different directions which translated into my frequently opening new docs in an effort to segregate and differentiate thoughts regarding data and workflow and user experience. I nearly suffered cardo-pulmonary arrest when a quick keystroke (ctrl + enter ) resulted in the pinwheel of death. Not wanting to cry too early I waited nearly 30 minutes for Pages to recover. When enough time had elapsed to realize all hope for recovery was gone I did a quit. When the quit did nothing I performed a force quit. Before I had killed the Pages program I noticed four documents were untitled(n) and hopefully assumed Pages had been autosaving for me. I was terribly wrong and all of my brainstorming and planning notes had been lost. I honestly felt a little crushed and lost any desire to try moving forward again. The only small concession was a screenshot that caught 2 1/2 of my unsaved documents.

In a grandiose gesture of frustration I Googled “iWork Pages autosave” and found that there is no such animal. Now I became conflicted in my opinion of Pages. On one hand I took full responsibility for losing the data, I was the one who didn’t save an initial draft when the document was created. I even reminisced life in the 90s when my rule of thumb to avoid losing Lotus Notes data was to hit ctrl+s often. On the other hand I felt that Apple failed on this one because even if I had initially saved the document they would not have periodically committed my changes to disk because autosave is non-existent in Pages. Even the technologically catatonic Lotus Notes Client has an autosave feature now.

Learning the hard way is a kind of signature I carry in my pocket so losing some data happens from time to time. I’m no stranger to banging on the keys with my eyes falling out of their sockets until I get something right. But with failures like Pages gave me the defining moment comes when I separate myself from that which will, almost as a guarantee, cause a repeat of the offending situation. The crazy thing is that I don’t really WANT to leave Pages and its simply easy UX.

Deep Sigh

Lost data is lost data so I moved forward knowing that my time with Pages was over. I have Microsoft Office for the Mac ‘08 installed but I loathe the complicated and confusing nature of that product so it was time to Google the field. “word processor for mac” gave me a good number of hits to work with. I was quickly drawn to a mac360.com review on “The top 10 List of Word Processors For Mac Users”. Pages, MS Office and NeoOffice are all missing from the list.

A review of the top 10 reminded me of MarinerWrite, a program I had looked at before and really liked. MarinerWrite will be candidate for a buy next time I see it on sale. I didn’t see anything that moved me in the top 10 so I headed back to search results where I found a listing of text editors and word processors for the Mac. The usual suspects showed up and I was resolving to just go NeoOffice again when I remembered IBM had been doing some OpenOffice.org stuff too… Symphony.

After installing and trying out Symphony I felt like my Mac was beginning to appear schizophrenic. Switching amongst WriteRoom, OmmWriter, TextMate, Pages, NeoOffice and Symphony was an exercise in masochism. None of what I was doing really felt like what I had signed up for. I sat back a minute and thought about where my comfort zone really sits. It didn’t take long to realize that I ran from MS Word and OpenOffice.org simply because I needed LESS. I write all of my blogs in a text editor where I can use markdown for the little bit of formatting I care about. I love hacking thoughts out in OmmWriter because there’s no formatting at all… just a flurry of words. Suddenly I realized the real solution for me wasn’t in the list of Mac apps at all because it transcends Windows, Mac OS & Linux. (or Linux or Linux or Linux or even more Linux)

I switched to my Google search window in Firefox and there the answer stared me in the face. At the top of my browser content window I saw the word “Docs.” The perfect answer exists online with Google Docs. Google’s solution is minimalist while still containing version and autosave features. Docs is no replacement for a serious word processor application running natively on your OS of choice… but I like it better than the word processors of choice right now. When OpenOffice and MSO can trim down their product maybe I can try them again as a mainstay. If Apple firms Pages up to include a safety net then I definitely will try again. For now the bulk of my time will still be spent in TextMate but Google Docs is there when company requirements hamstringing me into MSO can be avoided. Now I’ve got my word editor lineup set and can move on to something else.