I was working on the article on the plane this morning. When we were about to land in Dallas, I saved my work and closed iWork. I'm going to be in Florida for the next week, so I decided to switch over my time to central, as Dallas is also in the central time zone. So I did that.
Now I'm sitting at my gate with a two hour layover. I decided to do so more week after I ate lunch. I put together a nice graphic in Pages, where I overlayed a screenshot and drew on it to highlight important parts of the screen. This is something I usually use a separate program for because it's awkward in Word. I was able to do it easily in Pages. The thought went through my head "Word, your days are done."
I was so happy with this accomplishment that I hit CMD-S to save my work. I got some cryptic message about not being able to save unless I either entered a serial or began a trial. I clicked trial, and it told me that my 30 day trial had ended. Thus I could not save my work.
WTF!?!?! The stupid program hasn't even been out for 30 days. I'm assuming that it did this because I had tinkered with my date (changing the time zone) earlier. This indicates several layers of stupidity. First, iWork is verifying the trial against the clock on the computer. I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to do that anymore because it's so easy to circumvent. Oh, but Apple is smart. They're also doing a check to see if you mess with the date/time. Only problem is that their cleverness isn't clever at all. Changing timezones caused a false positive.
At this point I did consider going ahead and buying iWork. I figured I'm probably going to do it anyways. I just couldn't do that though. It would be like I had been bait-n-switch'ed. Apple broke their part of the deal (letting me use their product for 30 days) and I was supposed to now pay them for this? There's no way I could do that. I might not even buy iWork at all now.
So instead I opened up Word, and copied the document over to it. Luckily I wasn't too far along, so it wasn't too hard to re-assemble or reproduce the non-text parts (like tables, code samples, and the infamous screenshot.)
