“Rumors that Apple Computer have been quietly developing its own spreadsheet solution gained a dab of credibility this week as sources pointed to a revealing company filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” Katie Marsal reports for AppleInsider. “Just two days after requesting a trademark on the word ‘Mactel,’ which seemingly describes the convergence of Macintosh design with Intel hardware, Apple on June 8th filed for a standard character mark on the word ‘Numbers.'”
Marsal reports, “Described only vaguely by the filing as ‘computer software,’ Numbers may pertain to Apple’s recently released graphing calculator application. However, the company in recent months has filed for other marks that more accurately describe that application, such as ‘Graphulator’ and ‘Grapher’ — that latter of which is used in the shipping version. Instead, Numbers appears to conform nicely to the naming scheme used by Apple to describe the components of its relatively new iWork productivity suite. Consisting of only two applications, the iWork bundle includes presentation software called ‘Keynote’ and a word processor dubbed ‘Pages.'”
Full article here.
More info about Apple’s iWork here.
In related news:
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
What would the database application consist of, if Apple decided to truly take on the PC version of Office, or alternately, a replacement for AppleWorks? Would they bundle a ‘lite’ version of FileMaker?
And if M$ really makes the Office formats open and based on XML then *ANYONE* will be able to write competing applications.
USPTO,
Brilliant, but quite scary!
Note this is not being touted as the “killer app” to squash M$, as with that M$ “Photoshop killer” posted yesterday.
What’s the reason? They can’t possibly generate a spreadsheet program as powerful as Excel. Why aren’t they working on something similar to Access, but cheaper than FileMaker Pro?
I hope this is true!
because some of us would like a nice, simpler solution without all that Excel has, including the price
iggyb – I think the word you were looking for was “annoying” rather than “powerful”
“What’s the reason? They can’t possibly generate a spreadsheet program as powerful as Excel.”
I think that’s the very idea. Word, Excel, even PowerPoint – these are apps that are bloated beyond all reason, stuffed with hundreds of features that most users don’t even know exist, much less use.
Take a look at Pages. It’s not designed to be a Word killer on a feature by feature basis. It’s designed to produce professional looking documents with a minimum of fuss, and forget all the junk that the average Jane and John don’t care about. With this in mind, there is probably a large market for people who need a simple spreadsheet app that goes above and beyond the call in terms of being able to easily manipulate numerical information and produce killer graphs (think of how plain Excel’s graphing functions are).
Don’t forget Microsoft sells the Office suite for hundreds of dollars. iOffice would be another nice revenue generator along the lines of the iLife suite that would fill the needs of many, many users.
Wasn’t there some really cool NeXT speadsheet that used a completely different paradigm for spreadsheet calculations? Seem to remember reading about it somewhere. Maybe that’s what’s about to make a reappearance.
Numbers eh? perhaps it’s something to do with their share price, or market share, or shipments of Mac’s coming up????
Stay the heck away from Access! What a load of crap that application is. FileMaker Pro is so much more elegant and just as (if not more) powerful. The amount of crap you have to do and the number of hoops you have to jump through to make a simple report out of your data using Access is ridiculous. It is a typical Microsoft application- bloated and not very intuitive.
The reason FileMaker Pro is so much nicer and is actually intuitive is that FIlemaker (the company) is a spin off from Apple. Why do you think the database portion of AppleWorks looks so much like FIleMaker Pro? ‘FileMaker Lite’ is a part of AppleWorks in a sense.
Welcome news. Surprising no independent or Filemaker folks has done an office suite. Open is o.k. but not native or very Macish.
I’d like to see Apple finish the work they started on Pages as well. It’s been stuck at 1.0 sorely needing some key features, bug fixes and such.
Rock on Steve!
I agree with NewType – what’s needed for the vast bulk of the population is less not more. Faster not slower. More reliable not buggy. Easier to use not harder. Apple can add ‘Widgets” for Pages and Numbers to do just the jobs you need, not provide you with a massive globulous complexity of do-everything programming that Office is now. The Cheetah versus the Hippo is the way I see it.
Newtype, I agree 100%. I worked with an accountant called ‘Agent’, nicknamed because he was always ‘on a mission’. Even though he excelled (no pun intended) at accountancy he HATED Excel – too many features that were useless to an accountant who needed SPEED and EFFICIENCY more than FEATURES that NOBODY WANTS.
Not me speaking, an accountant with 25 years experience. And with a name like Agent, would you argue with him?
“Wasn’t there some really cool NeXT speadsheet that used a completely different paradigm for spreadsheet calculations?”
You’re thinking of Lotus Improv. It would be cool, I agree, to resurrect Improv.
Of course, there’s always Mesa.
Hey who says ‘Mactel’ is Macintosh and Intel? Why can’t it be a phone?
Just two days after requesting a trademark on the word ‘Mactel,’ which seemingly describes the convergence of Macintosh design with Intel hardware, Apple on June 8th filed for a standard character mark on the word ‘Numbers.'”
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hahahhaha Apple’s gonna say Mactel.. hilarious.. Win vs. Mac..
the Numbers things sounds great!
Again.. Apple’s card is ‘how can we do this cool stuff, without annoying MS too much’
they are indeed the kings of ‘backup plans’
expect this numbers thing to not be released unless MS threatens to pull office..
which they might do, … if Windows has to compete against OS X on Intel systems
It’s about time. I’m sick of using Excel
Steve is gradually putting piece after piece in place of a Master Plan that is only now starting to be visible. It is really run to watch this – especially from the greener side of the fence
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This is a replacement for Appleworks you bozos!
Databases are tough…but what Apple really should do (and probably already is) is putting together an “Access killer” consisting of a kick-ass GUI wrapped around mySQL. There are a few barely passable front-ends to mySQL, all going for a good chunk of change–Apple would really have the chance to make OS X a great database OS without having to build a database engine, just use mySQL as the engine and concentrate on making it easy to use, administer, and better yet use mySQL as the engine with such a good GUI wrapped around it that people wouldn’t even know they were using mySQL until they wanted to add something on.
This is a replacement for Appleworks you bozos!
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Who’s the bozo.. everyone knows that.. the trick is to convince MS that iWork is benign.. while making it better and better every year.. until a ‘we’ll pull Office’ threat is not that scary..
but you already knew that..
Year of HD? Try Year of the Backup Plan