Pages, you deceived me
by lamelas
Since I changed to a Mac I never needed to use a word processor. So I never worked neither with Pages neither with Microsoft Word for the OS X.
Last week I was assigned to write a paper for the Game Theory subject with 6 to 10 pages. Even before I chose a subject (since it was free, as along as it was related with Game Theory, I took some time to choose it) I decided I would use Pages. I know exactly what to expect from Microsoft Word, I tried it thousands of times, I used it for writing my entire life (with some exceptions to Vim for writing LaTeX documents) and so this would be a wonderful time for trying out a new word processor.
Pages is pretty clean, the default templates are very nice and they look very good. I liked the fact that I could drag a picture from Safari directly into the cover page.
So I started to write. My paper is about the wonderful subject of Mixed Strategies in Game Theory. I wrote one page and a half and I was very happy with my Pages experience. I saved my work and went home.
Today, the unthinkable happened.
I was writing for about an hour, I had written another page and a half and I wanted to insert some mathematical formula. I found the option that would allow me to do that on one of the menus and clicked it. Pages crashed and I chose the option to relaunch it, of course. I was expecting to lose some of my work but I lost everything I wrote today. I was so sad. I never expected any word processor not to have a auto-save option activated by default and I never expected any word processor not to have a temporary file that he would be able to recover if the software crashed.
Yes, it was my fault because I didn’t save my work regularly. But still, word processors must have a way of taking care of that. In case we forget.
So remember kids, computer lesson number 5489793: always save your work with regularity.
EDIT: Wikipedia really has all the information a person needs to survive.