Rumor: Apple planning cloud-based iWork suite for iPad to fight MS Office - Page 2

 

All this talk about a word processor as capable as MS Word, got me thinking of my favorite one of all: ReadySetGo!

 

It was often compared to Quark and PageMaker in the nineties before it was taken over by an European company who just doesn't advertise in the USA. What a great program and it made Word look second rate. 

 

It is still available in USA English and upgraded to work with OSX. I wish Apple would buy this great 20 year old product and make it work on iOS.It's also one of the best priced page layout programs at $175 US.

 

Reference: http://www.diwan.com/ready/prsg.htm

 

Ah, you mean the mobile version of Office, which doesn't exist, and therefore isn't being used at all?

From the article:

So why not just make it online in the same fashion as the rest of the iCloud suite?

I wish Apple would throw their mac based users of iWork a bone. 3 years+ without a new release only tiny updates that they really had no choice but to release. A bit like the iMac or MacPro release, it simply shows that Apple doesn't care that much about those that want/need a refresh.

There is MathType for iWork which works seamless and great. That's what I use for Pages.

FINALLY! At least an article about iWork. I use Pages on a daily basis. Why I still like it much better than Word, it is growing old and there are basic features missing, e.g. simple addition of line numbers (I know that there is a clunky workaround). Also numbers is a much better basic concept than Excel (>1 spreadsheet on one canvas), it is somewhat clumsy and lacks a lot of features/math operations. So, yes please bring an update to iWork! It's ridiculous to sell a product with the label '09 on it.

Also, iCloud integration so far is a neat start, and it's great to let open Keynote on one computer and edit it on another and access it easily from everywhere. But it is a real pain - well, rather unusable - that the iOS version of iWork is not fully compatible with the OS X version. DO something about this, Apple!

The problem is you.

 

FCPX is amazing and a great tool for the future.. however the so called "pros" don't like to learn and evolve...

I've always found the simple fact of doing a graph in Numbers incredibly confusing.
It's not obvious at all how to choose specific data to be displayed on the x or y axis, I wonder if they actually use it at Apple.

I don't see how a cloud app, with data stored on servers, could be successful. Enterprises and public entities want to be able to control their data.

iWork fails due to Apple's update policy. Even thought there haven't been any significant additions to iWork recently, it has been updated. But the new version doesn't work on 10.6, which has more current users (based on web browsing statistics) than Lion and Mountain Lion combined. There is no development reason for this (except for some additional testing), it's part of their plan to force users to downgrade to Mountain Lion.

 

When businesses take longer to update Office when updates exist than Apple has to update iWork at all, I really don't think this matters at all.

 

Lion has more marketshare than Snow Leopard on its own. Mountain Lion is two points shy of Lion.

 

Right, you know this for a fact, because you work for Apple and made this decision yourself. 

It fails because you can't run the same version of iWork on all of your machines, unless all are running Lion or Mountain Lion. It does matter if you can't or don't want to run all Mountain/Lion, but you want to pass documents around.

 

Where did you get your numbers? Here are end of August numbers from Chitika (originally referenced from an article on AI): 10.8: 9.61%, 10.7: 31.48%, 10.6: 43.28%. 43.28 > 41.09. This will, of course, change over time, but the point is 10.6 is and will be the largest for some time.

 

Regarding your unnecessarily negative response, what I meant was, the codebase worked on 10.6, and it doesn't appear to now use features or APIs that tie it to 10.7+. I believe (based on my own software development experience) that this was a marketing choice.

Edited by davida - 10/23/12 at 12:43pm

I use pages and keynote to create most of my papers and presentations. They just feel like they were actually thought out. Every time I try using Office, I just feel how cobbled together it is, and its rampant inconsistencies and its need to put irrelevant operations front and center just bug me.

Then, I also do all my spread sheets in awk or perl, and my calculator program is still "bc -l". Macs are great for that. Still unix.

As for references, they are the only feature I care about that I haven't been able to get working in Pages. There are some paragraph styles that I need which can't be created from scratch in Pages, but oddly enough, if I copy in a paragraph of those styles from Word, then I can save them in my templates as paragraph styles. FrameMaker was indeed great in the 90's, but I actually prefer the combination of Pages and OmniGraffle. If only OmniGraffle would let me easily connect to lines at right angles.

There are certainly things I wouldn't mind being added, and there are things that I would like in Keynote that Pages can do, such as paragraph styles. But Power Point doesn't do those either.

Honestly, these programs work pretty well. It would probably be interesting to see what cool things Apple could do with them if they out their minds into them. But, I already think they work pretty great for the most part. Except numbers, but I never liked spreadsheets much, anyway.

 

 

Why not? Apple isn't Microsoft. Apple can focus on catering to the creative pro market and build solutions for the backend. Not to mention if they have an enterprise offering its easier to get Mac desktops into the enterprise. 

Apple could build enterprise tools that are easy to use for managing Mac's and iOS devices. Not to mention develop solutions for the education market where innovation is sorely needed (lecture capture, learning management systems, etc...) 

Room control and digital signage are other markets that would benefit from an Apple solution. 

 

Apple will need to diversify, they can't keep selling iDevices forever.