Apple updates iWork for Mac and iPad with Apple Pencil annotations & more [u]

Posted:
in iPad edited August 2020
As a part of its Tuesday education event, Apple updated Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS, primarily adding support for the Apple Pencil -- a key feature of its 2018 "budget" iPad. [Updated with release and more feature details]




The iWork suite updates allow students to add drawings, diagrams, and handwriting to documents, even in Numbers, Apple said. Teachers and others, meanwhile, will be able to markup documents using a Pencil. "Smart Annotation," currently only in beta, enables notes to be anchored to individual pieces of text.

Pages for both iOS and macOS now incorporate digital book creation, eliminating the need for a separate app. A collection of templates is included, and books can be illustrated with existing images and videos or the new Pencil drawings. Real-time collaboration means several people can work on a book at a time, then share it as an iBooks file.




Miscellaneous Pages improvements include a Presenter Mode, side-by-side page views including two-page spreads, and the ability to build "master" pages for consistent design. Documents can be in landscape or portrait, and Apple has also brought in donut charts, insertable image galleries, editable character and paragraph styles, conditional highlighting in tables, and further editable shapes.

Numbers changes include the shapes, donut charts, conditional highlighting, and image galleries mentioned above, as well as new options for sorting and filtering tables, better CSV and text data import, and bidirectional flow of Arabic and Hebrew.

Among unique Keynote improvements are animated drawings in slideshows, easier theme switching, and customizable slide sizes and aspect ratios.

All three apps have gained integration with Box cloud storage, permitting real-time collaboration on documents saved there.

Beyond supporting the Pencil, the new iPad sports an A10 processor, and starts at $329 for the public and $299 for schools. It otherwise holds on to last year's technology.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 19
    sacto joesacto joe Posts: 895member
    I love this! It might even bring script back....
    tmay
  • Reply 2 of 19
    DuhSesameDuhSesame Posts: 1,278member
    It reminds me a question, how many features were still left in Pages 09’ compared to the Pages today?
    tallest skildysamoria
  • Reply 3 of 19
    MisterKitMisterKit Posts: 492member
    This would seem to break cross platform compatibility between Mac and iOS versions. Annotated documents will be read only on Mac in some aspects.
  • Reply 4 of 19

     Apple said. Teachers and others, meanwhile, will be able to markup documents using a Pencil.

    IMO, markup should be a system function as opposed to an app function.
    SpamSandwichdysamoriajony0
  • Reply 5 of 19
    kruegdudekruegdude Posts: 340member
    MisterKit said:
    This would seem to break cross platform compatibility between Mac and iOS versions. Annotated documents will be read only on Mac in some aspects.
    It’ll be interesting to see how these will be handled on the Mac.  I suspect iWork for Mac will need to be updated to deal with the new features. 
  • Reply 6 of 19
    MisterKit said:
    This would seem to break cross platform compatibility between Mac and iOS versions. Annotated documents will be read only on Mac in some aspects.
    In this article about Digital Books it seems to imply macOS as well

    https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/27/apple-unveils-digital-books-tool-for-creating-media-on-the-ipad-at-field-trip-event
    StrangeDayscommand_f
  • Reply 7 of 19
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    I thought I read a live blogger saying the updated iWork was available today. Incorrect?
  • Reply 8 of 19
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,312member
    I thought I read a live blogger saying the updated iWork was available today. Incorrect?
    Downloading now...
  • Reply 9 of 19
    elijahgelijahg Posts: 2,753member
    Still can't have a page with a different orientation in Pages. Still can't put citations in tables. Still have to manually add text boxes if you want to caption an image.

    Numbers' UI is still clumsy and seriously non-intuitive. Took me forever to work out how to stop Numbers from auto-selecting an X value for me, turns out the option was hidden in the dropdown "plot series as rows/columns" at the bottom right. Apple was once famed for good UI design... This is terrible. Selecting a range of graph data gets everything offset by one if there's an empty cell at the top of the range too. Changing the range frequently crashes Numbers. It's terrible at pattern recognition, a sequence of cells containing numbers with fractions frequently can't be repeated by dragging. You can't have a different font, font decorations or sizes in a table title. Error bars frequently get offset by one.

    I definitely wouldn't say these improvements warrant a major version number bump either, after 9 years the Mac versions are still hobbled in an attempt to keep feature parity with iOS's versions. It's a shame there are so many features still missing from Pages, as it makes layout easy and documents look great.
    edited March 2018 command_f
  • Reply 10 of 19
    MplsPMplsP Posts: 3,911member
    Apple still needs to upgrade file functionality on an iOS to make iPads  truly functional. iOS 11 was a big step forward, but a lot of functions are still like trudging through a swamp
    elijahg
  • Reply 11 of 19
    elijahgelijahg Posts: 2,753member
    MplsP said:
    Apple still needs to upgrade file functionality on an iOS to make iPads  truly functional. iOS 11 was a big step forward, but a lot of functions are still like trudging through a swamp
    They seem to be slowly and reluctantly conceding that an actual filesystem is required, shame the realisation seems to have come too late. As much as I hate to see it, most power-users seem to have moved to Windows. A massive folder full of files really doesn't cut it if you're using the device to product lots of documents. Unfortunately iOS on iPad is still miles behind Windows on MS Surface, and pace of development on iOS toward a more powerful system seems to have slowed. I'd love the iPad Pro to run full desktop apps; yes there are usability compromises but less so than Fisher-Price-esque iOS.
    edited March 2018
  • Reply 12 of 19
    jdb8167jdb8167 Posts: 626member
    MplsP said:
    Apple still needs to upgrade file functionality on an iOS to make iPads  truly functional. iOS 11 was a big step forward, but a lot of functions are still like trudging through a swamp
    I think it is pretty dumb that you can plug in a thumb drive into an iPad Pro but the only thing the iPad will see is a single photo folder and only photos can be retrieved. Just give me a normal file browser, how hard can that be? Instead we have dedicated hardware and iOS apps that perform the same function. It's a mess.
  • Reply 13 of 19
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    I pretty much gave up on Numbers as ever bring truely improved!   This means going to open source spreadsheets which really arent that bad compared to numbers (desktop Mac OS & Linux).  The big problem is almost zero success importing Excel or similar spreadsheets.   Invarably a function would be missing making the spreadsheet unusable.  Sadly this is across all devices Numbers operate on. 

    The problem i have is that this has gone on for years while we have seen dozens of updates that mostly provided trvial or worthless features.   After awhile you really need to question Apples grasp of the situation.   
    elijahg
  • Reply 14 of 19
    djsherlydjsherly Posts: 1,031member
    I can for the most deal with pages, but numbers is beautiful, hot, mess. 
    elijahg
  • Reply 15 of 19
    felix01felix01 Posts: 294member
    Are they downloadable yet? If so, where? The App Store on my iPad Pro still shows the 3.XX version for download although the version history lists version 4.0 availability seven hours ago.  
  • Reply 16 of 19
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    I presume these updates are available only to people with the most recent OS on all devices... The current iOS seems to be the only version Apple software ever supports. When they went to only two versions of Mac OS support for Logic, it became clear that things aren't going to get better in this regard.
  • Reply 17 of 19
    command_fcommand_f Posts: 421member
    elijahg said:
    Still can't have a page with a different orientation in Pages. Still can't put citations in tables. Still have to manually add text boxes if you want to caption an image.

    <snip> ...  after 9 years the Mac versions are still hobbled in an attempt to keep feature parity with iOS's versions. It's a shame there are so many features still missing from Pages, as it makes layout easy and documents look great.
    I agree that the "new" iWork apps were a great step backwards on Mac and appeared to be a lowest common denominator approach. However, restoring the double page view* is a huge advance for Pages. I believe that you cannot design a multi-page document without being able to see the facing pages as the reader will see them; without that, Pages could only really design a page, not a document consisting of several pages. Now it can.

    Combined with the previous restoration of text flow between linked text areas this gives me hope for continuing to use the app when Pages 4.3 (the "old" Pages) stops working (it's 32-bit so its days are numbered). More work is needed of course but this is a breakthrough day in my opinion.

    *It's hiding under 'Zoom', as if to reinforce the comments on Apple's declining skill in UI design.
    edited March 2018 elijahg
  • Reply 18 of 19
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    command_f said:
    elijahg said:
    Still can't have a page with a different orientation in Pages. Still can't put citations in tables. Still have to manually add text boxes if you want to caption an image.

    <snip> ...  after 9 years the Mac versions are still hobbled in an attempt to keep feature parity with iOS's versions. It's a shame there are so many features still missing from Pages, as it makes layout easy and documents look great.
    I agree that the "new" iWork apps were a great step backwards on Mac and appeared to be a lowest common denominator approach. However, restoring the double page view* is a huge advance for Pages. I believe that you cannot design a multi-page document without being able to see the facing pages as the reader will see them; without that, Pages could only really design a page, not a document consisting of several pages. Now it can.

    Combined with the previous restoration of text flow between linked text areas this gives me hope for continuing to use the app when Pages 4.3 (the "old" Pages) stops working (it's 32-bit so its days are numbered). More work is needed of course but this is a breakthrough day in my opinion.

    *It's hiding under 'Zoom', as if to reinforce the comments on Apple's declining skill in UI design.
    Apple tends to favor appearance over ease of use these days ("form over function") in UI.
  • Reply 19 of 19
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    I just saw the book templates in the new Pages... 

    ...iBooks Author is dead, isn’t it? They’re going to soft-discontinue it like iWeb. Spectacular. Now I have to move my entire book to Pages.
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