Apple takes iWork for iCloud out of beta, adds features

In conjunction with Thursday's iWork app updates for iOS and Mac, Apple has removed the beta tag previously adorning the icons of Pages, Numbers and Keynote in iCloud, while adding a number of new features like the ability to preview documents in mobile Safari and Android.

Prior to the change, each iWork app as displayed on iCloud.com appeared with a yellow "beta" tag on its icon to signify that the product was still in testing. Following today's iWork update, the tags no longer appear on the iCloud landing page or the iWork for iCloud informational webpage.

In addition to the aforementioned mobile preview capability, iWork for iCloud also comes with a commenting interface, document change tracking, version history, word count (for Pages) and support for ten additional languages. On the Web, users can work with Pages '08 and '06 documents, or Numbers '08 spreadsheets.

The last significant change to iWork for iCloud came in February when Apple made the Web-based productivity suite available to all comers, even users without iOS or Mac devices, by opening Apple ID account registrations. Previously, Apple ID logins were limited to owners of Apple hardware.

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30 Comments

badmonk

said about 8 years ago

What?! All my Apple documents will be sync'ed without engaging in MS Surface style recombination antics? Good job Apple.

haggar

said about 8 years ago

Does exiting beta mean the beginning of subscription fees?

danielsutton

said about 8 years ago

Apple needs to go full-throttle, and beef up iWork and iWork for iCloud, making it feature-comparable to Microsoft Office and other professional productivity suites. There is no reason why this cannot be done. Apple should do this because Microsoft is a lousy partner, they have a long history of "embrace, extend, extinguish" antics, playing nicely at first, and then stabbing their partners in the back. They did this with Microsoft Office for Mac many years ago, and they also did it to IBM, at first collaborating on OS/2, and then shifting the focus midstream to their own Windows NT operating system. These are but two examples. The next thing Apple has to do is build out their server platform with real honest-to-goodness hardware, in the vein of XServe (although they can come up with a new name for it if they so choose). Also, they should make an offer to buy JAMF Software, so they can bring their Casper Suite in-house, building it into OS X Server, so it can be a real EMM offering. They also need to adopt Active Directory as the default directory service in OS X, as Open Directory is not up to snuff for large enterprise deployments. This would also aid in helping iWork and iWork for iCloud become real enterprise-grade productivity suites. This is because documents can be hosted both on OS X Server systems, as well as in the cloud, through iCloud. Apple, please take notice of what I said, and make it happen!

haggar

said about 8 years ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by danielsutton

Apple needs to go full-throttle, and beef up iWork and iWork for iCloud, making it feature-comparable to Microsoft Office and other professional productivity suites. There is no reason why this cannot be done. Apple should do this because Microsoft is a lousy partner, they have a long history of "embrace, extend, extinguish" antics, playing nicely at first, and then stabbing their partners in the back. They did this with Microsoft Office for Mac many years ago, and they also did it to IBM, at first collaborating on OS/2, and then shifting the focus midstream to their own Windows NT operating system. These are but two examples.

The next thing Apple has to do is build out their server platform with real honest-to-goodness hardware, in the vein of XServe (although they can come up with a new name for it if they so choose). Also, they should make an offer to buy JAMF Software, so they can bring their Casper Suite in-house, building it into OS X Server, so it can be a real EMM offering. They also need to adopt Active Directory as the default directory service in OS X, as Open Directory is not up to snuff for large enterprise deployments.

This would also aid in helping iWork and iWork for iCloud become real enterprise-grade productivity suites. This is because documents can be hosted both on OS X Server systems, as well as in the cloud, through iCloud.

Apple, please take notice of what I said, and make it happen!

I would rather see products like Casper and Dropbox remain platform agnostic and provide high quality support and feature parity for all platforms. Apple has a history of acquiring established software companies and then killing the PC versions of their software such as Shake and Logic. "Embrace, extend, extinguish"? Do you think killing these applications on the PC will drive those users to the Mac?

And sometimes Apple ends up discontinuing the acquired application even on the Mac (Shake). Filemaker seems to be an exception since it is still being actively supported and updated for both Mac and Windows.