Numbers…Cool Little App
I just got a copy of iWork 08 in the office today and decided to install it during some downtime this afternoon. I had to write a short piece for the paper and thought it’d be fun to do it in Pages.
So, I did. Worked fine, although I was a bit dismayed to find the Word Count (a vital feature for newspaper writing) in the Inspector window instead of in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
Otherwise, no complaints.
Then I played with Numbers. I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy, although I do use them when I can’t avoid them. (That seems to be more often than not with the Film Society, not with the JFP where most of the financials are done in MYOB AccountEdge. But, I digress.)
What impressed me immediately was the graphical nature of Numbers, which made working with the spreadsheets I needed to create (a very small budget and then a list of our film society’s board members — I was filling out a grant application) fun to do. I got through those two sheets and decided to play with the templates.
While they’re cute and fun, I tired of the built-in Numbers templates quickly. So, I decided that I yearned (yearned!) for others. I found my way to Numbers Templates, a fun little site where people are posting a variety of different templates for Numbers. The programming for these things can get pretty sophisticated and, even more to the point, the sheets created tend to be attractive and fun to work with.
Like FileMaker, Final Cut, and Keynote before it, Numbers may be the “killer implementation” of an app for creative Mac users because it focused on both the mundane and the aesthetic. Suffice to say that I’m going to continue surfing for spreadsheet templates to play with — and that’s not the sort of thing I would have said, er, yesterday.
Stranger Than Fiction - Fun Flick
I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night and thoroughly enjoyed it…great cast, wonderful set design and photography, and the film had a great supernatural-comedy feel to it — something like a cross between Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and Woody Allen comedies of the 70s (Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex) with a dash of “Oh God!” and “Heaven Can Wait” tossed in for good measure. Will Ferrell does a great job in an understated straight-man lead, Emma Thompson plays a darkly comedic role very nicely, Maggie Gyllenhaal is compelling in the tattooed-girl-next-door love interest, and both Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah send home their supporting parts. It’s certainly stylized and a touch slim in places (Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine” is certainly a deeper film) but overall very entertaining and well directed by Mark Foster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball).
Crossroads Festival Commerical on YouTube
The 2007 Crossroads Film Festival is over, and a great time was had by all. Here for the sake of posterity is the Crossroads Film Festival TV commercial for this year:
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