“Apple did a fine job in upgrading its iWork apps — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — for Mac OS X,” Dennis Sellers writes for Apple World Today. “The Pages upgrade is especially sweet (of course, it is the iWork app I use the most).”
“The most pleasant surprise: the new version of Pages can open documents created in the ’06 and ’08 versions of the software, something that you previously couldn’t do,” Sellers writes. “This was a major flaw in the app, especially considering that, whatever you think of Microsoft’s Word, it maintains excellent backwards compatibility with older files.”
“Of course, if Apple really wanted to make its iWork apps successful, it would offer Windows (and Android?) versions,” Sellers writes. “That’s something for Tim Cook and company to consider.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What do you think about iWork for Windows? (Screw Android.) Would an iWork for Windows fly because people would be looking for compatibility with their iPhones and iPad or would it just be another Safari for Windows.
They have a iWork for windows AND suckdroid, it’s called iWork iCloud.
There’s already an iWork for Windows, it’s called iCloud.com
Still waiting for basic features to be put back. I wonder if it will happen before I retire.
Let the Windoze users use the web version.
“You can force click images and get haptic feedback as you edit…”
Whoop-di-fucking-doo! I’d like to be able to link text boxes, thanks. Y’ know. Like has been part of layout since PageMaker 1.
I use Pages at work..love the “old” version..getting used to the new..however, haven’t updated to this latest version. Did the fix paste to match style (not a right click option..now in freaking edit menu)? Make it so the tools panel isn’t expanded automatically (annoying)? I have a basic template I work off of, then export to word onto our server. Best of both worlds as long as they don’t dumb it down any more than they have already.
The most important feature missing is text flow between text boxes in Pages. Also helpful would be cross referencing such that you can link figure captions and references in the body of the text (including text boxes) so that when you insert or delete a figure all of the numbering automatically adapts.
Numbers is nice. My usage is simple so I’m not a good critic of this. I need to check the charts. They used to choke when I tried to plot a spectrum with 1024 data points.
Keynote is good. I use it a lot from short 20 minute presentations to all day six hour marathons.
Keynote needs three things.
1) Layers. The motion tools are very nice but after you add a few objects it is hard to deal with them because they are overlapped.
2) A Timeline. It would be great to have a timeline like in GarageBand to help order things.
3) A Light Table. I would like to pull down a light table of sorts where I could keep frequently used slides or stacks of slides. Often when I build a presentation I have some new material but I also want to draw on previously made slides. Now I have to find an older presentation, open that, find the good parts and copy them. A pull down collection of slides would be much more productive.
While they are at it, I hope Apple shows some love to iBooks Author as well.
Office365 with 1Tb of storage is hard to beat now.
iCloud is REALLY hard to use in a business environment where you always have something in a project in a format that can’t be stored in iCloud and components have to be stored in their respective “slots”.
I haven’t checked to see if all the functionality in Pages 9 has been restored in the new release – numbering of Headings was missing in the last release so it was impossible to number a group of paragraphs without creating Sections which was very unwieldy.
As for Numbers… I have never been able to paginate a multi-period bank statement to allow annotations and separation of periods by week or month. Charting was hopeless as well.
Keynote is nice and much easer to use than PowerPoint.
It comes down to whether Apple views iWork as a defensive or growth product.
If Apple wants to take the worldwide office suite market by storm, and create a major new revenue source, then they should support Windows and even Android.
But if Apple just wants to avoid having its customers become too dependent on Microsoft Office or Google Docs, then it only makes sense to have a Mac/iOS/web version.
Yes, Apple should produce iWork for Windows along with Notes, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders.
Why?
Protect and increase existing iOS sales with Windows customers. Syncing data between iOS devices and Windows can be a real pain in the neck with Outlook. It is even worse without Outlook.
Apple has a genuine opportunity to convert these customers to the Mac if they have a great experience. Currently, the syncing experience with Outlook is far from great!
Two additional advantages:
– Familiarity
– Data compatibility
Every new version of iwork is essentially a rewrite. This is because Apple disbands the dev team with each iteration. When the marketing folks decide it’s time for a new version to maintain the pretense that apple cares about application software, a new team is assembled. The new team inevitably decides that the old codebase “sucks” and tells management that a r4ewrite is required and/or less expensive that trying to work from the old code base. Thus each new release loses features and introduces whole new waves of bugs. Every iteration of apple application software is essentially a release built for demo purposes.