Apple Adds Endnote-Only Citation Support to Pages
More dumb decisions from Apple.
They add code and interface to their new version of Pages to add citations and generate bibliographies, but they tie it exclusively to Endnote. It would have been feasible for them to add generic support and an API so that other application developers (say Zotero, or Bookends) could provide the same functionality, but they instead privilege a single vendor with a substandard product, and a tendency towards suing their competitors and customers.
No thanks Apple. I have Pages 08, but never use it. I don’t expect that to change with 09.
The more I watch Apple, the less and less I am interested in their products, whether it is all the restrictions around iPhone, or this kind of thing with their desktop software offerings.
I saw that, and it weirded me out too. Who paid whom? How many people who use EndNote use Pages?
Steve’s ‘RDF’ wearing off?
Speaking of Kool-Aid drinkers, people are already complaining about problems on the Endnote forums.
Well, at least there now is some support for citations in Pages. And, most importantly, it should be possible to find a way to reverse engineer the connection between the two, and replace EndNote with something better, like oh… I dunno… CiteProc?! I haven’t yet investigated it, but with EndNote being Carbon, it is likely done with AppleEvents. AppleScript could also be a possibility.
Pages itself is at least a whole lot nicer to work with as a text editor than Word is. My big annoyance with Word is that a lot of things are in modal dialogs, which are though to navigate, and make me feel trapped.
As for Apple chosing EndNote, that is not a big surprise. It is, unfortunately, the most commonly used bibliography manager. I do sure hope that there will be official API’s made available, but at least Apple now has acknowledged the need for citations…
I basically agree with Johann. While I certainly would like to see support for other citation managers, Apple is just following the market leader here.
@Johan/Simon: you guys might be right, but I’ll just point out that the Apple advertising is very explicit about “Endnote support.” There’s no hint anywhere that they see this as an open plug-in solution. But we won’t really know until someone takes a look.