Apple's Pages, Keynote and Numbers all function very similar to Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel. In fact, not having used the Apple applications prior to this assignment, it was hard to point out too many differences in the programs just based on the tutorials. I did notice that Apple's programs seem to be very intuitive. This is not a new realization, as I have always found Apple products to be easy to use. However, I would say that in some cases, you might have to figure out what the icon is representing before realizing it is intuitive. For example, I might not have thought the paint brush icon on Pages to be where I would find the editing tools. However, when I stop and give it a little bit of thought, it does make sense.
I do not feel I can adequately speak to any one Apple versus Microsoft application to completion. However, there are some differences I can point out just by simple observation. For example, the use of the mouse is not required for iPad applications. It is nice not to have a peripheral device to keep track of. Moving pages around and manipulating the menus is easy to do.
In Pages, it appeared to be easy to insert and crop images into a document. While this is not a difficult task in Word, the ability to just grab the picture, squeeze it together with your hands to resize it or rotate it, seemed simple. It is also a nice feature that Pages can be put into Google Drive.
For Keynote, there were a couple of features I found to be appealing. Adding animation appeared to be an easy process and there were many animation options available. In fact, I know of one professor who prefers the options of Keynote (backgrounds, animation, colors, artwork) better than PowerPoint but still prefers to display the presentation in PowerPoint. I also like the fact that you could use your iPhone as a remote when giving a Keynote presentation. When looking at the iPhone remote, you could see any notes that you had added to the presentation as well as see each step in the animation chosen for the presentation, as opposed to just having the presentation view as your viewers have.
As for Box.com, I did sign up for an account. I have experience using Dropbox, as I frequently use it with my transcription business to share large voice files. I found Box.com to be very similar. An application such as this is a nice way to share either documents that are too large to e-mail, items that you want to remain confidential between you and the person whom you chose to share it, or working collaboratively. When using the Box, you can edit documents and share them easily. I know from personal experience that my mother-in-law and husband share a recipe folder. As cooking is one of their hobbies, they can easily trade recipes and have them on-hand at all times without having to call each other to "get your recipe." Box.com is also available for mobile devices.
When comparing iBooks and Kindle apps, again, they are very similar in function. However, in order to purchase something through your Kindle app, you do have to log on to Amazon and purchase your reading material there. This differs from iBooks where you can simply purchase your item from the link which routes through iTunes. Both can be uploaded to the cloud. I did notice on the tutorial that iBooks allows you to organize your books into customized folders in a very easily. When researching if this could be done on Kindle, it did not appear there were options beyond organizing by title, author or recent date.
Lastly, Safari and Rover. Rover is a cloud based streaming system. It is an answer to Apple not using Adobe Flash. Safari is a web browsing application used by Apple. One feature I was not aware of when using Safari was the ability to search a document for a particular word. If I am not mistaken, this is just a feature available for iPad. This feature caught my attention as I can think of times when I have opened a webpage from a Google search looking for a particular phrase and have had to search for the one sentence I needed.
Overall, I think both Apple and Microsoft offer good productivity applications. I wonder if part of people's preferences is based on what they learned to use first.
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