AppleInsider Staff
Alongside Tuesday's release of macOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple also issued an update for its iWork trio of apps for Mac, adding real-time collaboration with users on iPhone, iPad, and iCloud.com.
Pages 6.0, Keynote 7.0 and Numbers 4.0 are all available to download from the Mac App Store. The updates deliver the real-time, cross-platform iWork collaboration that the company promised earlier this month.
Apple's iWork suite for iOS was updated one week ago alongside the launch of iOS 10. And now, as of Tuesday, Mac users can get in on the mix with their own updates.
Apple's real-time collaboration feature remains in beta. It allows users to edit presentations, documents or spreadsheets with others at the same time across iOS, macOS and web.
After updating, users can share their file publicly or with specific people, and also see who else is viewing or editing the document at that moment. The cloud-based editing tools also allow a user to see participants' cursors as they edit.
The Pages update also allows users to open and edit Pages '05 documents. Version 6.0 also gives the ability to use tabs to work with multiple documents in one window, and it supports wide color gamut images.
Keynote's update adds Keynote Live, allowing users to present a slideshow that viewers can follow on their Mac, iPad, iPhone and from iCloud.com. It also adds support for Keynote '05 presentations, adds tab support, and wide color gamut image support.
Finally, Numbers also joins in with tabs to work on multiple spreadsheets in one window, and wide color gamut image support.
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Pages: Mail Merge, Mail Merge, Mail Merge!
Boy am I glad to see the other persons curser, I don't know how I lived without it so long!! /s
This is too little, too late. In my experience, most are already using either Office365, or Google Apps, both of which have this and many other features already in place. I really like this suite and use it whenever I can, but Apple really couldn't get any slower at developing this suite of apps and its eventually going to be all this work for not much return if they can't pick up the pace.
Personally I wouldn't touch anything Google does with a ten-foot pole, and I really (really, really) hate Office. So this is just what the doctor ordered.
I seem to recall that very early versions of OneNote had this feature. Tried it once or twice and while it was an interesting parlor trick it largely felt like a solution in search of a problem. For me, a more typical scenario for working on a single "document" with multiple concurrent contributors has always been to have one person "driving" the live edits and others contributing ideas or assessing the overall progress or checking for errors. Having multiple authors simultaneously injecting content seems rather chaotic and while it does good demo it still seems a bit contrived. Perhaps this type of collaboration would work for remote pair programming. I do applaud Apple for delving into the realm of collaboration tools and features because there are so few in existence - but the lightbulb isn't lighting up for me on what I'm seeing in the iWork suite, not yet at least.