Daniel Eran Dilger
The job posting calls for a candidate who "will be part of the core engineering team responsible for the design and development of the software system," asking for strong programming skills and "commitment to delivering great user experience," suggesting that iWork will be expanding as a consumer facing web app.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Apple will pursue online document editing similar to Google Docs or Microsoft's Office 365. To date, Apple has restricted its iWork.com to making documents created in Pages, Numbers and Keynote available to other users for viewing and collaborative comment.
iWork.com is being combined with Apple's existing MobileMe apps to deliver the upcoming iCloud website, which the company just made available to developers for testing.
Existing MobileMe apps (most of which are being brought forward to be part of the new iCloud) do translate desktop apps into web equivalents, ranging from Mail to iCal to Address Book. By folding iWork's web presence into these existing apps, Apple may be signaling an intent to eventually deliver some iWork document editing functions into its web apps, but the company has never publicly announced any intention to eventually do this.
Apple prioritizes mobile apps ahead of web apps
Instead, Apple's priority has clearly been to deliver mobile iOS versions of its iWork apps, initially targeting iPad before also adding support for iPhone and iPod touch users, rather than trying to replicate its Cocoa apps using HTML5. The tepid response to MobileMe's web-based alternatives to Mail, iCal and Address Book suggest that an investment in translating iWork's far more complex apps into standalone web apps would probably not be very successful either.
Apple's prioritization of moving iWork to its mobile devices as native iOS apps has resulted in Pages, Numbers and Keynote remaining in the iPad's highest grossing top ten apps since its inception. The apps also rank in the top 100 best selling iPhone apps amid a large number of free and low cost games.
In general, web apps have proven to be far harder to sell, even for Microsoft and Google. Even Apple's iWork.com, which was launched two years ago for free with the notice that it may someday require fees, never got around to asking for any money.
iCloud also ahead of any potential iWork web apps
Apple's recent web application announcements have all centered around iCloud, which will provide iWork apps on the Mac, iPad and iPhone with the capability to keep their documents in sync and current across a user's devices, as well as making it easy to share large documents with other users without resorting to email attachments (using web sharing features similar to those that are already present on iWork.com).
Apple hasn't delivered an entirely new version of iWork since launching iWork.com at the beginning of 2009 alongside the release of iWork 09. However, a minor update has recently added support for features of Mac OS X Lion, including Full Screen, Resume, Versions and Auto Save.
A developer 1.5 release of iWork apps for iOS devices has also added iCloud support under the forthcoming iOS 5.
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Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
12 Comments
Still no sign of a major update for the iWork desktop apps. I love iWork, can't wait to see how it's been developed. Hopefully I won't have to wait too much longer!
Still no sign of a major update for the iWork desktop apps. I love iWork, can't wait to see how it's been developed. Hopefully I won't have to wait too much longer!
Hopefully it supports export ePub 3.0.
Sure would be nice to extend an API to support the likes of XeTeX/LaTeX from TeXLive as the typesetting output option when producing PDF. It'll never happen, but one can dream.
Na, probably just a rushed placeholder iPhone 4 until the 5 is announced.
Still no sign of a major update for the iWork desktop apps. I love iWork, can't wait to see how it's been developed. Hopefully I won't have to wait too much longer!
The sad part is even though we have waited so long already, any update to the desktop apps will almost certainly just be for iCloud functionality. We won't get a 'real' update (as in a rethink of the UI or the features or anything new at all really), until probably next year at the earliest. Maybe not at all.
While I enjoy the apps as they are, I do feel somewhat cheated personally in that I switched to iWork for everything and dropped Office completely, yet Apple hasn't bothered to do much for us in this regard. Pages still feels like a 1.0 product on the desktop and the iPad version still doesn't even have a full feature set more than a year after it's debut. You don't even have the beginnings of the ability to edit or even control the styles for instance, which are the heart of any word processor.
It's sad because they could be so much more. I mean they push the thing as an alternative to Office, and while it's never (hopefully) going to include all the bloat and useless crap that Office has, it currently doesn't include enough to be seriously considered as an alternative for anything but the most casual of users. Sometimes I think that the designers believe that updating the templates each time is all they have to do and that they consider the core product "finished." It's not.
It reminds me of a lot of Apple products, in that they sometimes come out with a big fanfare and show great promise, but then languish for years without an update (usually because the one guy they have working on it was transferred to another department). In truth this happens way too much with Apple products and I believe this attitude will eventually be their downfall, even if it's years down the road.