Shane Cole
Apple on Thursday rolled out another update to its nascent iWork for iCloud web productivity suite that brought a new flat user interface and added key features like password protection and keyboard shortcuts.
The most prominent of Thursday's changes revolved around the suite's trumpeted collaboration features. Users can now add passwords to spreadsheets, presentations, and documents and share those password-protected files with others.
In addition, the apps sport a new way for users to see which files they have been granted access to by others. VoiceOver support has also been improved for accessibility-minded users, and new keyboard shortcuts for rotating, resizing, and repositioning objects have been added.
Numbers was given the ability to flow text into adjacent cells and to apply rich text formatting to text in table cells, features present in the desktop version but missing from the web variant until now. Users can also take advan
Both Pages and Keynote now support tables with customizable formatting. Pages also gained support for styling anchored and inline images, shapes, and text boxes, as well as the ability to edit endnotes in Microsoft Word documents.
Alongside the new features, Apple promises its usual smattering of bug fixes and stability improvements.
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22 Comments
Not sure if this sinew (is to me), but I noticed how notifications now pop in at the top of the browser window. iCloud is coming of age.
I use it all the time, I have all my spending budgeted and actual transactions in Numbers spreadsheet and I can update it on the go using my iPhone so I always know how much money I have before making spending decisions and see the effect it will have on my balances into the future all stored in the cloud. Then I can go over and make final tweaks from my laptop at home , all shared with my wife so we are always on top of our spending
If this is 'coming of age,' then all I can say is that we, as Apple fans, must have rather low expectations.
At the moment, iCloud is a pathetically limited product in terms of functionality. Unless I can store all forms of data and can have substantially more storage cheaper on a per GB basis, it is not useful for much more cute-sy home-related media. (Granted, the one useful feature is iTunes Match). There are many better alternatives.
Incidentally, does anyone know: did the ability to export files to iWork09 disappear in iCloud? If so, it has become all more useless for my needs!
Add: This is was in reply to paxman.
Did they finally add track changes for shared documents? If not, then this still doesn't do what I need it to do. I often work with people half way across the world. Thus, we are not easily able to work on the same document at the same time. So, we need an easy way to see what changes and comments the other has made. At this time the only way for us to do this is to send files back and forth with track changes turned on. The whole point of being able to share documents is the ability to track changes between editors. The fact that Apple didn't add this is a major oversight on their part. When they add this, then I will use iWorks for iCloud a lot more often.
@anantksundaram Think you may be looking for a Google Drive or DropBox type service, both available FOC.