RICHARD TAYTOR  Apple seems to target those who wish to use their computers as heaters. I'm disgusted with their software. Look for yourself, at the effect on your system resources (Activity Monitor will show that). It's quite simply negligence. Demand better! Don't put up with this crap!  
(Version 9.0.2)

PUNKISH  Pages '09 4.0.1 (build 746) has a major bug. Its entire Endnote integration is missing. I have verified this with Apple, filed a bug report, and they have "escalated" the report, whatever that means. If your life depends on Pages+Endnote integration, do not, DO NOT, upgrade to the latest iWork update.  
(Version 9.0.1)

EASER  However trivial this sounds, I'd really like to know. Does this newer version allow for a "Save" icon in the toolbar? I haven't found one in the previous version, and it would be very handy for me. Thanks.  
(Version 9.0.1)

153957PHOTOGRAPHY  Ah, very helpful and informative description (what's new)

Isnt there some kbase article which more specifically tells us what's new?  
(Version 9.0.1)

APPLEDOGX  iWork 09 is a good upgrade to the iWork suite. I find myself using Pages more than anything. It's easier than ever to share with Word users, though I find that the email as a Word document is not adding the file extension that Windows users need, even though I select to do so for saving the documents. Pages is easier to use than Word, and very flexible. It still cannot do footnotes in a table for some reason and Apple has not responded to add this feature from the previous version.

Numbers is quite usable now. It is the most improved of the three applications for iWork 09. I hate the odd implementation of the new transpose function, though. You have to combine it with index for it to be useful. This is one thing that Excel definitely does better. For the most part, Numbers is very easy to use, and developing a Numbers based mindset and forgetting the way you work with other spreadsheets, opens you to its great possibilities.

Keynote's magic move is great, but when you have transparency in a magic moved photo, the magic seems to disappear. It becomes tiny, moves and then springs back to size. This magician needs some serious bug fixing. Flash export is also gone, but all in all, Keynote is easy to use and makes superior presentations to the competition.

I upgraded from iWork 08, and I'm glad I did. The changes were worth the outlay.  
(Version 09)

XIAOPANGZI  OBSERVATIONS:

• Pages ’09 is now viable as a full-time replacement of Microsoft Word, as long as Find & Replace functionality is significantly expanded with a downloadable update in the very near future.

• Unable to search for bold, italic, underlined, subscript, superscript, or highlighted text, or text with specific fonts, colors, etc., within documents in which the original writer did not define styles (did not use a style sheet).

• Unable to use clipboard content for Replace All, such as when replacing all instances of “CO2” with the equivalent that contains the proper subscript number.

• Unable to specifically search for only one-byte or two-byte characters within a document, unlike the Japanese version of Word (or with Japanese enabled via Microsoft Language Register).

• Unable to automatically convert double-byte characters to their single-byte equivalents or vice versa.

• Unable to search upward.

• Unable to search for combinations of unspecified numbers and letters or use any other wildcard searches.

• Unable to search for unspecified uppercase letters or combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters.

• Unable to highlight text if the desired color is already selected in the Apple, Developer, Crayons, and Web Safe Colors subpalettes in the Show Colors formatting palette, so a different neighboring color has to be temporarily selected before reselecting the desired color to be applied to the current text selection.

• Difficult to identify the applied highlight color of selected text, as the System Preference’s default Highlight Color is still used even for highlighted text instead of Pages using a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color, as is standard in Word.

• Word files with first line indentation lose most of their indentation when opened in Pages.

• Have encountered a couple of Word files that crash every time Pages attempts to open them until finally giving up.

DESIRES:

• An option in Preferences that enables certain Views—especially Show Invisibles—by default for all documents, whether newly created or imported from Word format

• Access to the Inspector via the pointer while inputting search (and replace) criteria in the fields of the Find & Replace dialog box, as most documents do not have styles defined by the original author

• Ability to search across all open documents and search upward to find the previous instance of any criteria

• Fullest possible regular expression search via the Find & Replace dialog box but preferably selectable from a pulldown menu with natural user-friendly language.

• Ability to apply the currently selected color in the Show Colors palette as highlighting for any selected text via a single click (without having to deselect the desired color first) and then have immediate visual feedback that the highlighting has been successful by displaying the text selection highlight in a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color.

ADDENDUM:

Cannot see which text is selected when the character background fill is the same color as the system’s default highlight color for selected text.

Cannot see the punctuation even when View Final is selected during an editing session with Track Changes enabled when text has been deleted in front of a comma, semicolon, or period, as the black triangles remain and conceal that portion of the sentence. It would be preferable to hide the deletion indicator black triangles in Final View (and even in View Markup Without Deletions) similarly to how the underlined added text and strike-through deleted text appear as normal text in Final View. An alternative may be to make the black triangles a more transparent color, possibly the same as the color used for the added and deleted text.

Spacing between words becomes sporadic even with View Final selected during an editing session with Track Changes enabled, particularly with wider spaces appearing between words where text has been deleted. It is preferable for the View Final mode to display text exactly as it would appear after all changes have been accepted, such as with normalized spacing, without having to actually accept all changes first.  
(Version 09)

FRODO_LIFE  Focusing on pages here to.

very nice update actually for the first time started and finished a project in pages.

However PDF exports quality is lousy the PDF's don't look half as good as if I export a inDesign documents.

the text is not really smooth doesn't matter what font I choose.

It also seems odd that I cant have different columns on different pages on the same document (at least could not figure out how to do it)  
(Version 09)

OZEAN  Seems to be a nice upgrade – I'll only focus on Pages here:

The outline feature and the full screen view are important and they are nicely implemented. As my previous reviewer, I am baffled by choosing Endnote of all Bibliography apps on the Mac as the one that gets special support by Apple. Luckily, Bookends provides scanning abilities, too - just imagine how nice the result could be if Apple decides to work together with the Bookends team on Bibliography support (look at Mellel to see how great this can be!)

However, what surprised me most about this release is that Apple still does not offer an auto-save option. How could this be? This is such a simple feature. But without it, I am sure to loose at least a day or two of work over the course of six to twelve months. Crashes, hangs and power outages just happen to often to not have the ability to auto-save. For me, this is a major shortcoming – one that will make me stay away from Pages for production use. Too bad.  
(Version 09)

LEV  Can't comment on Numbers as I seldom use a spreadsheet; but I imagine the mailmerge between Numbers and Pages will suit a lot of people who felt hemmed in by the previous version, which only let you merge with Address Book contacts. And Keynote... I don't use it enough to comment, although it looks very fine and has superseded PowerPoint in every detail, long ago. But Pages I can comment on.

Pages '09 is very smooth. The dynamic outlining feature works flawlessly (even if the fancy transition from Outline view to Pages view is slow on my G5 desktop machine) and its ability to collapse body text to the first line in Outline view is a fine way to move around long documents. (Yes, yes, Word has had that for years but... well... outlining in Word is, for me at least, (a) broken and (b) more trouble than it's worth.)

Speed of navigation in long documents is good. Round-trip with Word works fine. But the best feature for me is the iWork.com publishing system. A bit like Google Docs but smoother. Editors or collaborators can comment on the web version or download Pages, .doc or PDF files. I tried it from scratch and it worked flawlessly even though it's allegedly in beta. They can work in whatever they like; _we_ can stay in Pages until the very last moment. Sweet.

Pages itself still isn't quite the heavyweight WP I'd want for book-length mss., particularly academic work. It lacks cross-referencing and only has footnotes (no endnotes or multiple note streams like Mellel, still the academic gold standard). And why on earth did Apple go for compatibility with the lethal, belly-dragging, antediluvian Endnote instead of Sente and/or Bookends? (Though Bookends within a few days announced compatibility with the Pages native format.)

But with those provisos, it's a winner.  
(Version 09)

ACCOUNTCLOSED  A demo with mandatory registration? Pretty soon Apple will require users to bend over and cough before accessing their web site.  
(Version 09)