Apple today announced iWork ’06, a new version of Apple’s suite of productivity software with new features designed to make it easy for users to create even more compelling documents and presentations. iWork ’06 includes major enhancements within Pages 2 and Keynote 3 including stunning three-dimensional charts, iPhoto-like advanced image editing and masking tools, and spreadsheet-like tables that make it easy to get great results in minutes.
“By leveraging the power of Mac OS X and seamlessly integrating photos, movies and music from iLife, iWork ’06 brings productivity software to life,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Marketing in the press release. “With great new features in both Pages and Keynote, iWork ’06 offers even more ways to create, present and publish professional-looking documents and presentations.”
iWork ’06 is highlighted by a set of new features within Pages 2 and Keynote 3 that give users the ability to create more sophisticated documents and presentations. Tables with spreadsheet-like calculations can be inserted within any document or presentation giving users the ability to add, multiply or average numbers in rows or columns. Users can also create stunning three-dimensional charts featuring realistic wood grain, metal and marble textures and fully control the viewing angle. iPhoto-like advanced image editing tools help to perfect photos directly within documents and presentations. Freeform shapes and curves, including Bézier curves and shapes with perfectly smooth edges are easy to create and use to mask images. iWork ’06 also adds the ability to include reviewer’s comments to slides and documents without affecting the layout.
The easiest way to create great looking documents from simple letters and flyers to professional-quality newsletters and brochures, Pages 2 features mail merge with Mac OS X Address Book, making it easy to personalize documents with predefined fields within templates and quickly drag and drop individual contacts into documents. Pages 2 also features two dozen new templates for newsletters, flyers, posters, school reports, scrapbooks, brochures, business proposals and invoices to give users a head start in creating custom documents. New thumbnail and search views make it easy to work with large documents and quickly find any word or phrase within a document.
Keynote 3 offers more ways to create cinema-quality presentations and interactive slideshows with new features designed to bring those presentations to life. Keynote 3 features new cinematic transitions including vertical or horizontal blinds, revolving door, swoosh and more. Keynote 3 offers even more Apple-designed themes, including four specifically designed to take advantage of HD displays. A new Light Table view mode makes it easy to view an entire presentation at-a-glance and reorganize slides using drag and drop while flexible build animations provide more control of bullet lists, tables and charts including unique timing and sequence of individual bullets, rows, columns or series.
iWork ’06 supports a wide range of industry standard file formats including Microsoft PowerPoint and PDF. Keynote 3 imports and exports PowerPoint files and exports presentations to QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, HTML and iLife. Pages 2 imports and exports Microsoft Word, RTF, HTML and plain text files. Both Keynote 3 and Pages 2 export to PDF and import associated AppleWorks files.
iWork ’06 is now available through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $79 (US). A 30-day iWork ’06 trial will be available on new hardware and with copies of Mac OS X and iLife ’06 sold at retail. After 30 days, the trial becomes an iWork ’06 player. iWork ’06 requires Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or 10.4.3 or later, a Macintosh computer with a 500 MHz or faster PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5 or Intel Core processor, 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended), 32MB of video RAM, QuickTime 7.0.3 or later, and a DVD drive required for install. iLife ’06 is recommended.
More info about Apple’s new iWork ’06 here.
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I was just checking out the new Pages… It seems Apple doesn’t want to introduce a spreadsheet program. They just integrated the most used features in Excel right into Pages, charts and calculations.
I find that very interesting. Then through in Address book Merge, and this Word Processor with style becomes somewhat useful out side of making flyers…
Now I want to play with it.
Well, Apple announced a 5-year commitment from Microsoft to continue producing Office for the Mac. Microsoft didn’t give this commitment for free. Apple may have promised a moratorium on Numbers; probably not for the full five years but maybe for two or three.
Personally I read “five-year commitment for Microsoft to sell Office” as “Microsoft will discontinue Office for the Mac in five years”.
I wouldn’t say that MS is going to discontinue Office in 5 years. This is the same type of agreement they went into in the late 90’s. After the 5 years is up, then they will see how things are going and then decide.
A lot can happen in 5 years….who knows, maybe Apple might be selling iWork to Windows machines in 5 years….
(Although, on the Windows OS side, not much does happen in 5 years – XP was released in October of 2001….)
It’s getting hard to connect to the server, anybody out there seeding it?
MS has always extended the agreements in 5 yrs increments. Office for the Mac is very critical app and Steve would say so himself. iWork doesn’t compare in overall features but it is easy and clean.
Office is MS’s most important app. Having a mac version prevents another competitor from building an office suite that can take over the mac platform and then go after the windoes market.
Not to mention that MS makes millions of dollars of Office for the Mac. Office for the Mac isn’t going away anytime soon.