Last week I immersed myself in the newly updated iWorks '08, the fancy schmancy office productivity suite released by Apple a few weeks ago.

The suite of applications boasts a bevy of improvements and upgrades to both Keynote and Pages, the software's presentation and word processing applications, respectively. The release also signals the much-awaited launch of Numbers, iWorks '08's first-ever spreadsheet application.

Overall, I liked iWorks '08. I found the application suite to be as easy to use as Apple promised and though I ran into a few glitches here and there, I can see why Steve Jobs and the gang are so thrilled to bring iWorks '08 to the masses. Anyway, during my testing of iWorks, I discovered an interesting tidbit related to Apple's system for saving files.

Khyati Shah, one of Apple's publicists informed me that because Pages is used for a lot of different services, Apple has designed it so files created in Pages aren't read as regular files. One of our readers elaborated further on the topic and explained that Apple employs a unique storing system that saves files, such as those created in Pages, in directory form versus document form. The reader wrote:

Browsers and other applications allow one to attach files, not directory. You can check that by using a standard UNIX command using the Terminal Utilities

The extensions, therefore, are only used to navigate the directory. So when you select "File Save," what's really going on is you are actually storing your file in a directory. The .pages extension is simply part of the file's naming process.

While testing iWorks '08, I had read a few blog posts where people mentioned difficulty attaching documents they created in Pages to a regular old e-mail. Sounded like a strange problem for sure, so of course I wanted to investigate. After creating a document in Pages, I tried to attach the new file to a personal Gmail account I use. Sure enough, it didn't work. While I was able to browse to my file using Internet Explorer, I wasn't able to actually attach the file to my e-mail. I was also able to browse to my file with Safari, Apple's in-house Internet browser. When I reached file however, it was grayed out. So, then I compressed my Pages-created file and the document attached. Easy enough yes, but also rather puzzling.

Now that I have an answer, it's interesting that opening a document created in Pages is akin to opening an ODF file in an archiving program, except in Pages, the file isn't zipped.