IWork File format

Question

Hi, am I the only one who thinks the iWork file formats are less than ideal? For those who don't know what i'm talking about, .pages and .keynote files are essentially a folder. Within that folder, Pages places all the files it needs to recreate a document you're working on.
The trick is done by OSX, who makes the user believe .pages folders are in fact a file document instead of a fodler. but you can browse the folder from terminal or Windows, for example.
A problem is that you can't send or share a .pages doc as easilly as you do with .doc for example. Try to attach it to hotmail or gmail and it can't happen, because the service sees you're sending a folder and refuses.
Apple Mail does the trick too by compresing the .pages into a .zip file. But's that's not Apple-elegant, in my opinion.
I'd like to know opinions on this subject.

Answer 1

Hi, am I the only one who thinks the iWork file
formats are less than ideal? For those who don't know
what i'm talking about, .pages and .keynote files are
essentially a folder. Within that folder, Pages
places all the files it needs to recreate a document
you're working on.
The trick is done by OSX, who makes the user believe
.pages folders are in fact a file document instead of
a fodler. but you can browse the folder from terminal
or Windows, for example.
Your Mac OS X applications are folders too, just like a Pages document is a folder.
You can also browse these folders in Mac OS X from the Finder. Ctrl+click the document and choose Show Package Contents to reveal the folder.
A problem is that you can't send or share a .pages
doc as easilly as you do with .doc for example. Try
to attach it to hotmail or gmail and it can't happen,
because the service sees you're sending a folder and
refuses.
Apple Mail does the trick too by compresing the
.pages into a .zip file. But's that's not
Apple-elegant, in my opinion.
I do think this is elegant. Mail recognises the problem and seamlessly handles it. The only other thing it could do is offer to open Pages and convert the document to another format. Realistically though, you wouldn't want this to happen without checking the document formatting, etc before sending it to the recipient.
In the example you gave above, this is more Safari's problem. That is, Safari should be doing the same thing that Mail does. It should recognise you want to attach a Pages document to a File Upload field in a Hotmail web page form, and automatically zip the entire folder and put this in the File Upload field.
I'd like to know opinions on this subject.
You'd better get used to this situation. The next version of Microsoft Office for Windows and Mac are both adopting a similar file format, and it will be the default file format. So you'll then start receiving email from other people that either contains a zipped MS Office documents, or one file from the MS document's folder. The same applies to OpenOffice, the second most popular office suite.
The only positive about this change is that the new MS Office and OpenOffice file formats are open and documented. So Apple will have the option of fully supporting these new file types not only in Pages, but also in Mail and Safari.
I think it's probably important that as many people as possible send feedback to both the Pages and Mac teams asking them to:
1) support the new MS Office and OpenOffice formats;
2) cajole the Safari team into supporting Pages documents just like Mail does.
<http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html>
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/>
Dale