> but Pages and Numbers seem to deviate from the traditional UI for word processors and spreadsheets Good. Overloaded toolbars suck. Hundreds of undecipherable

> but Pages and Numbers seem to deviate from the traditional UI for word processors and spreadsheets Good. Overloaded toolbars suck. Hundreds of undecipherable icons instead of text sucks. Excessive modal dialogues for things like advanced paragraph styling, bullet formatting, spacing, indentation, and page layout sucks. The best thing iWork ever did was take all the things that were hidden and put them in plain sight without oodles of near-identical icons trying to represent abstract concepts, with good ol' plain text and hierarchisation in NeXTSTEP-style floating inspectors. iWork's best UI was in '09 (and maybe a few versions before, though I don't remember them all that well) with the floating inspectors. They showed everything in a usable, vertical format, same as the current inspector panels, but easily movable. They still exist to in modern iWork, though I find it has too many top-level sections. The pièce de résistance of iWork '09 was the context-sensitive toolbar beneath the customisable NSToolbar: depending on what you had clicked on, it would show different tools so that you didn't have to constantly click through the inspector's various sections. Best of all, it wasn't some weird floating palette that randomly seemed to fade in and out as in Microsoft Office; it was always there, glued to the top of the window. The hand knew exactly where to go. You could do most of the basic formatting tasks using just the toolbar. I mourn its loss. Maybe one day Apple will bring it back. The inspectors gave you what the ribbon tried to do, logically ordering all the myriad tools available; the context-sensitive toolbar filled the gap that the inspectors made, making it so you didn't have to constantly switch between inspector sections. To me, that was bliss. Current iWork is close but it was better as it was.