Preview: iWork ’09, A Quick Look
As nearly every reader of this site probably knows, Apple has released the next iteration of it’s productivity suite, iWork. With this iteration, Apple has added some polish as well as some brand new features. If you are unfamiliar with iWork, it is made up of 3 applications: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
Pages, the word processor of the bunch, gained features such as full screen, outline view, as well as more templates. Apple has also made it easier for it’s scientific crowd to add in equations from MathType and bibliographies from Endnote. The developers also noticed that many users were taking graphs and tables from Numbers and placing them into documents, so they streamlined the process and now the entire iWork suite of apps work very well together.
Numbers, like Pages, got a handful of new templates as well as a whole slew of functions which previously did not exsist within it’s formula library. It also allows users to create more advanced charts and give tables categories.
Lastly, Keynote now allows you to control your presentations via an iPhone or iPod Touch. As well as adding “Magic Move” objects and chart animations, among many other things.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of the new iWork is iWork.com. iWork.com adds collaboration to the entire suite of products and is built directly into all of them. So with the click of a button, you can upload a document you are working on and allow your co-workers to download it as well as make comments to it.
Initially, I am very impressed with the new features that Apple has brought to the table here. The install process of iWork ’09 took a mere 2 minutes and all the apps seem to run silky smooth. Pages’ full screen mode works just as billed and actually gives you a current word count and the ability to access the toolbar by simply sticking your mouse at the top of the screen. The iWork.com collaboration works very well with the only exception being that I get an error when trying to send an invite to other users. As it stands, iWork looks like it lives up to the hype but only a week’s worth of use will tell if this is truly the case.
I have only scratched the surface with the new verison of iWork, so keep your eyes open for a full review in the coming week.
I’ll certainly be working on iWork ’09 soon, but I’m really annoyed to see that the table of contents still hasn’t been fixed to deal with tiered numbers. In my experience, it’s a crucial element that is missing, and Apple still hasn’t fixed this flaw.
For the rest, it looks very nice. Especially iWork.com (though the thing crashed for me when I tried to upload a 200-page text document from Pages).
At my work, we’re more and more feeling the need to work with several people together in one document, at the same time, like it’s possible with Google Docs and Zoho. I’m amazed that iWork ’09 (or even iWork.com) still didn’t enable that possibility…
[...] suprised that there was no mention of Snow Leopard. I posted my thoughts on iWork ‘09 over at MacApper and will have a full review there in the coming [...]
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