In the first big news of 2005, according to Think Secret, “Apple will launch its new iWork ’05 productivity suite at Macworld Expo, Think Secret has learned. The software, code-named Sugar, will include Keynote 2 as well as a new application, Pages.“
Apple Will Release Its Own Office Suite: iWork 2005
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Adam Scheinberg
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Very sweet, I am missing a suite that was simple, yet creates beautiful documents. Office 2004 is nice, but I could do with more speed and more usability. I have no problems sacrificing some silly features. I don’t even need perfect compatibility with word/excel documents. I just need to write a few papers, create some graphics in a spreadsheet, nothing more complex than that.
Obviously, that is just me. Other people will no doubt have different needs, which isn’t matched by a simple works suite. Let the “I have no use for it, so it sucks”-comments begin!
Don’t forget that any office suite made by Apple will benefit from being a pure cocoa app as well.
This is great if it’s true.
Note that Apple hired some founders of Gobe (of the office suite GobeProductive, which is/was available for Windows/BeOS). It might very well be that iWorks will be similar in concept.
I’m not a Mac user, but I hope this new office suite will help us push back the .doc format in favor of a (hopefully) open fileformat?
iWorks would enable M$ software free mac clinets in an office… as long as it is M$ office compatible. Do they plan not to attack the Word Excel market or be content with the PowerPoint market?
Personally I’d like to see something that is Visio compatible.
I wonder if this is Apple’s attack to the office PC market.
“don’t go renew your office with cheap Dell’s come and get out headless iMacs, we have everything you need.” The average office worker doesn’t need much more than e-mail, work, excel and calendars. Or is it targeted at regaining power in the education market, I wonder. Either way, iMacs, Tiger and iWorks apple seems to have a lot to show off.
My hope would be that the format (although unlikely and probably difficult to implement) would be pdf. Imagine a word processor that directly manipulated pdf. Barring that, I think rich text would be the best option.
Mac OS X Tiger, iWork ’05… I’ll buy many new softwares this year! 😀
I use AppleWork for all I need, so iWork will be good for me. 🙂
There will be also iLife ’05, but the only iAppsI want from this suite are free to download: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie. I don’t use GarageBand and I haven’t a Superdrive in my beloved iBook G4 12″, so I don’t need iDVD too.
Well, very well for me! :-]
Don’t forget that any office suite made by Apple will benefit from being a pure cocoa app as well.
where was this one dreamed up? iPhoto and iTunes aren’t cocoa apps, and if they want to produce a reader/editor for windows it would be easier to do it in carbon. If the office market is their target a reader on windows would be essencial, no?
Or maybe they could go down the PDF road and tell windows/unix users to use PDF as reader format.
“My hope would be that the format (although unlikely and probably difficult to implement) would be pdf. Imagine a word processor that directly manipulated pdf. Barring that, I think rich text would be the best option.”
The PDF saving option are embedded in Mac OS X since… its origin! 😀
A PDF word processor would be nice but I think Adobe would not be happy.
So I’ll be content with good ‘import from PDF’ and ‘export to PDF’ functionality .
“Or maybe they could go down the PDF road and tell windows/unix users to use PDF as reader format.”
I repeat: the PDF saving option are embedded in Mac OS X since its origin!
When Apple releasead Safari Microsoft dropped Internet Explorer for the Mac.
Now releasing a good office suite Microsoft may want to do the same thing with Office for Mac (but maybe not, after all, they make some money with their Mac version of the software)
interesting but im really unsure of this move. how many years has it takeing openoffice to get where it is? koffice? ec..
would be nice if they ported + worked on koffice…
‘ms compatability’ is seen as the holy office grail.. how compatible will iWorks be? will it be scriptable? will it convert VBA to applescript or whatever?
mmm. a new office suit would be interesting. appleworks is really not up to scratch anymore. abiword needs lots of work. gnumeric is nice but clunky. OOo is pretty good and 2 is looking even better. Koffice looks very nice when they get it all working for a 2.0 release. (if koffice had same leve of compat as OOo has with ms office, it would be kickass).
Is the new word processor format open? Did Apple use the Open Office XML format? Did they at least set up for import/export?
There is no reason why they need to directly port Open Office, just allow the import and export to improve compatibility. That is why you have open Document formats.
Why would the Windows reader have to be built using the same framework as the the actual application.
Anyway readers are waste of time. You are not going to convince many Windows users to download a reader. Much better just to use the built in PDF support and have other export filters.
When Apple released Keynote did Microsoft drop PowerPoint for Mac?
It’s true that Microsoft released a good new version of PowerPoint.
Any way, since before Safari IE for Mac was stoped to the 5.x version.
At the same time IE for Windows was 6.x…
Bad exemple, Kico. 🙂
> Personally I’d like to see something
> that is Visio compatible.
OmniGraffle3 imports and exports Visio. It is one of the best, most versatile applications I’ve ever used. Check it out:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/
It’s a bit pricey, but the demo is fully functional – The only limitation is that you can’t have more than 20 objects. No problem for a lot of stuff.
“‘ms compatability’ is seen as the holy office grail.. how compatible will iWorks be? will it be scriptable? will it convert VBA to applescript or whatever?”
If Pages (or any name it will have) will have the same MS-format compatibility of Keynote I can sleep dreams of gold! 😀
where was this one dreamed up? iPhoto and iTunes aren’t cocoa apps, and if they want to produce a reader/editor for windows it would be easier to do it in carbon. If the office market is their target a reader on windows would be essencial, no?
Well, is Keynote a carbon or cocoa app? I don’t know. It doesn’t have a Windows viewer as far as I know either.
iPhoto and iTunes are legacy from the OS 9 days, so I’m sure that they would be carbon apps.
In any case, an office suite made by apple with certainly have a much deeper integration than MS Office with some of the more useful features built-in to the frameworks.
I think that support for VBA will be a little tougher than support for the Powerpoint file format. Personally I don’t care if the support VBA or not. I doubt Apple is targetting businesses with extensive use of VBA right now.
I hope it is just a nice functional word processor and spreadsheet for Mac. I found Appleworks to be a truly dreadful product.
Hmmm, this story is interesting. It was long rumored that a complete re-write of AppleWorks was underway. But, Jobs has neglected AppleWorks terribly and it seems he doesn’t much like anything that hasn’t come directly out of his return to Apple. That is not a flame or even a criticism – it just seems to be the case.
iWork does not seem to address the education market, so it seems to me AppleWorks will stay at least for that area.
Jobs makes bold proclamations about Apple products, but does not usually (if at all) directly challenge Microsoft. At least not in the sense of saying stuff like, “We’re challenging Microsoft Office here and now!! Rather he seems to introduce products, say how great they are, but not compare them too often to Microsoft products, thus avoiding head on clashes. OS X Panther still includes Internet Explorer in the default install, despite the stop in development and the advent of Safari. Don’t rock the boat too much.
With FileMaker Pro out there, it seems assured Apple would not add a database program to iWork. So, that really leaves a spreadsheet as the missing component. It will be interesting to see if iWork is an “expanding” project.
JohnOne:
You are missing my point. Sure OS X exports pdf. I mean that it would be the *native* format of the word processor, i.e. you can *import* and *edit* pdf documents because that is its native format.
Does PDF store information in a way that is easily editable?
I have used Acrobat Pro before and it is quite difficult to manipulate much of anything to make changes after the PDF is created.
Ever heard of Lyx?
LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software.
I think Apple may do something like this that uses TeX and the like.
The best chance for apple to get into offices is probably via use of open office. That might not be the goal though.
Buy a dell and you get MS office on the cheap. This would give apple something comparable.
Then again apple is supposed to be going after small business and they might be happy to use apple office so long as it maintains compatibility with MS.
This is a direct port of Open Office to Mac. Works pretty good, does not need X-11.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
iWork is already the name of an OS X software package.
http://www.iggsoftware.com/iwork/index.html
Apple should look at OpenOffice. OpenOffice is available on all platforms, most of them natively.
I know that the KDE people ported OOo to KDE and the QT toolkit a little while back. Works fine for me, with the complete look and feel of KDE.
Trolltech has a QT environment for Mac, which compiles apps with a native look for OSX. You don’t know that the app runs QT in the background.
If somebody has the time, the source code of OOo KDE edition should be ported to OSX with the above products. Apple must have enough people around that can port this to their environment. Apple could contribute in less that a month with a complete Office suite, which is available on all platforms, has good compatibility with Microsoft and uses an open standard for files.
What else do you need ?
I agree with the poster above. NeoOffice is a great thing on Java and OSX. I use it on my Powerbook and threw all of Microsoft office out ….
“Koffice looks very nice when they get it all working for a 2.0 release. (if koffice had same leve of compat as OOo has with ms office, it would be kickass).”
I may be wrong, but I believe that koffice now uses OOo’s import filters, etc.
I’d like to take a look at this new office suite…an office suite with Apple’s focus on usability should be pretty cool. Even better if they would port it to other OSes.
Wow, you’re right! I wonder what will happen with the name conflict?
I broke down last year and *finally* bought Office for X because Appleworks’s inablity to render ‘s corrrectly when switching to/from Word finally pissed me off for the last time.
But I was a little dissapointed when I saw there was no version of Access for the Mac.
I don’t use databases all that often at home, but I wanted to create my own custom database to catalog our collection of DVDs.
I know there is FileMaker, but frankly, I don’t want to lay out for it, even though I can get an academic discount. And neither do I want to learn SQL simply for the purposes of creating a little d-base of movies.
The developers decided to hold off on OS X native version until Version 2 of OpenOffice.org has been released. Version 2 will completely separate the display code from the logic code which will make it much easier to port OpenOffice.org to different OS’s.
I bought the student/teach edition of MS Office this summer and I now wish I had saved my money. I find myself using OpenOffice for everything from creating business cards to cd labels. And I love the fact that I can export to PDF on the fly. And at the same time, I know that my file is in a format that I can get my data out of.
KadyMae, AppleWorks won’t do the trick for that? I’ve found it handy for little things. Of course, it is very limited.
There have been a lot of people talking about how Apple should get involved with OOo and KOffice and porting them to OS X. As for OOo, currently it looks like 2.0 won’t even build for X11 on OS X never mind native. There was a big post a little while back saying that unless developers get involved, there is going to be no OS X OOo (X11 or native).
Most importantly, Apple isn’t going to do anything with the GPL. Apple can stomach the LGPL and MPL because they don’t mind contributing the underlying code back to the community (as they did with WebCore and Darwin). Apple isn’t going to give away what they are good at, no matter what you are hoping for, and that’s their interfaces.
Now, Apple might go after KWord, but because it is LGPL licenced, Apple is going to be able to keep all of the good stuff private.
Still, I don’t see that as likely. While Apple did grab Konqueror’s rendering engine, a web browser is a much more difficult thing to create than a word processor. With a word processor, you are dealing with an environment that you completely control while a web browser has to deal with every idiot who makes a terribly coded web page. Apple built Keynote from scratch and I would expect the same here.
There have been arguments about Carbon and Cocoa too. First, someone posted that iPhoto was Carbon. It isn’t. It’s Cocoa. iTunes is Carbon, but it was also created for Mac OS 9, originally. Someone said that Carbon would allow it to be ported more easily, but I don’t think that is really a concern for Apple. I mean, Apple doesn’t really port their Carbon app (iTunes). They actually ported Carbon. Apple has, in the past, had Cocoa runtime engines for Windows NT. I’m sure it wouldn’t take too much effort on their part to bring them up to date with the few changed Apple has made in the OPENSTEP spec. Finally, Cocoa allows them to take advantage of Mac OS X like Keynote does. Have you seen Keynote’s transitions, ability to line things up and work with graphics? Cocoa is leveraging the built in capabilities of Mac OS X there. I don’t think they are going to get rid of the chance to build in some neat features that rely on the Mac OS X graphics engine.
If it ships with the alleged sub-600$ Mac, count me interested. If it doesn’t…. uh, I could care less?
The headless-iMac rumor is the first interesting thing I’ve heard out of Cupertino since the G5. One of those things I want to be true so damned badly that everything else is just lame by comparison.
It looks like the name is iBiz right now from the link you posted
Anyone who doesn’t know Cocoa is the direction of Apple is smoking the crap they demanded back in 1997 ala Carbon.
Keynote was developed by the lead Architect who developed Concurrence while at Lighthouse Design.
All of Apple’s new applications will leverage CoreData which is Cocoa EOF Lite.
I’d expect when Tiger is finally completed the Frameworks released in Cocoa to access CoreImage, CoreAudio, etc., will be fully documented at the ADC.
I myself hope Apple could leverage TeX/LaTeX for publishing power, while abstracting it better than LyX having a much more extensive support infrastructure to read classes one adds from CTAN, on the fly, instead of having to go to Terminal.app and texhash the updates (i.e, Apple will do it behind the scenes for you).
Personally, I write LaTeX directly so it’s no sweat off my *****.
If anything these releases won’t come to fruition until the release of Tiger OS X 10.4.
“Does PDF store information in a way that is easily editable?
I have used Acrobat Pro before and it is quite difficult to manipulate much of anything to make changes after the PDF is created.”
Illustrator CS files can be viewed in ‘Preview’ on OSX (the option “Create PDF Compatible File” must be checked in illustrator) .
Also, there is this absolutely-great application called ‘Create’ from Stone Design (http://www.stone.com). I’m not sure but it seems to use PDF internally.
Last but not least, Tiger will come with an improved PDFkit framework that could help this purpose.
“When Apple releasead Safari Microsoft dropped Internet Explorer for the Mac.
Now releasing a good office suite Microsoft may want to do the same thing with Office for Mac (but maybe not, after all, they make some money with their Mac version of the software) ”
I for one am happy to see a product competing with MS. However, I do see your point, one monopoly is not better than another. Apple, continues to make for a tendency of a closer platform, Apple HW, Apple OS and now Apple SW!
Granted they are not there yet, but the tendency is. I remember a time when platform strife to get 3rd party developer to write for their platform, now we seem to be observing the opposite and all apple platform is not good.
Look at Adobe abandoning the Macs because of this. It can’t be good. If I do not, personally, like MS, I do not want a MS Jr. either.
Anyway considering that the G5 is such a great 64bit cpu, Apple would do better in concentrating on making OsX truly 64 bit as for now is a 32bit OS running in an underutilized 64bit CPU.
Anyway, maybe with all the cash flow coming in from the iPod is time to blow away some money.
Well: I don’t see what we win if Apple imposes its own proprietary format .iDoc or whatever instead of MS’ .doc one…
(Do you really think Apple is going to open its format ?!)
Leo.
why wouldn’t it be? the “i” moniker seems to go with non-pro offerings (ibook, imac, etc.) so it would seem that a software package of this name would fit the same billing.
appleworks seems to be a bit dated. hmm. seems logical?
LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software.
If comparing to Word, this is a pretty good feature. I am a graphic designer and prefer to tweak, so this could be a good starting point, but I would still like to tweak to my heart’s (eye’s) content.
Does PDF store information in a way that is easily editable?
I have used Acrobat Pro before and it is quite difficult to manipulate much of anything to make changes after the PDF is created.
Although you can edit PDFs, they are not the same as a normal Word document. Apps like Quark XPress and Adobe inDesign manipulate the text’ properties so much that when they export to PDF, they format the final PDF for rendering not editing. So, you cannot easily edit a paragraph like in the native document.
My only experience is with exporting to PDF from other apps and doing little tweaks with Acrobat and Illustrator after the fact. If it requires more than a minor tweak, I usually go back to the native application, edit and export again.
Microsoft wont drop Office for Mac until it stops making them money.
Adobe dropped Adobe Premire for the Mac because Final Cut Pro took away all of the sales. Thats just simple business.
It looks like Apple will use an XML based format for their word processor like they did for Keynote.
While Apple has nice PDF integration in a lot of OS X frameworks, they also use XML wherever it is appropriate, and it only seems logical to use it in a productivity suite. It wouldn’t take long before their schema gets adopted by openoffice, or even better: maybe they’ll just use the OASIS schema from in OpenOffice.org, and thus produce OOo compatible files.
The Keynote format on the contrary is very different from any other presentation format. And it may take a while for other applications to adopt it.
The Apple Presentation XmL (APXL) format is freely available here:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2067.html
Adobe dropped Adobe Premire for the Mac because Final Cut Pro took away all of the sales. Thats just simple business.
Adobe is a little different to Microsoft. MS develops the OS and application software. If MS believes Mac OSX as a platform is challenging the Wintel status quo then they may pull Office X, profitable or not, if they believe it will assist in keeping OS X out of the mainstream.
Put another way as long as MacOS X remains a fringe player and Office X remains profitable they will keep Office X alive.
Do you really think Apple is going to open its format ?
I for one do. Do you know what the following is?
<presentation xmlns=”http://developer.apple.com/schemas/APXL“ version=”36″ xmlns:plugin=”http://developer.apple.com/schemas/APXL“ self-contained=”true”>
It’s the root element of a Keynote presentation. A Keynote “file” is like a .app bundle: a directory with an extension, containing all the elements of the presentation, and the layout is described by an XML file.
Granted, you need to have an application that can emulate Keynote if you want to read the file, but you don’t need to fight against the file format in which your data resides.
“Adobe dropped Adobe Premire for the Mac because Final Cut Pro took away all of the sales. Thats just simple business.”
ADOBE cut it’s own foot off becuase it didn’t update Premiere to us DV when Apple asked them to.
Also Adobe let go of their Premiere team that was developing the ultimate video editing app(FINAL CUT PRO) to Macromedia and finally Apple aquired the team adn the program that now is Final Cut Pro and focused on DV(firewire).
Than it took Adobe 4 years to almost catch up with Apple with Premiere Pro. Adobe sucks so much sometimes…
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2067.html
KadyMae, AppleWorks won’t do the trick for that? I’ve found it handy for little things. Of course, it is very limited.>>
Spreadsheet is not a database.
At the moment I have a spreadsheet in Excel.
“ADOBE cut it’s own foot off becuase it didn’t update Premiere to us DV when Apple asked them to.
Also Adobe let go of their Premiere team that was developing the ultimate video editing app(FINAL CUT PRO) to Macromedia and finally Apple aquired the team adn the program that now is Final Cut Pro and focused on DV(firewire).”
Well, I understand, but to be fair to Adobe, they were an early supporter of Apple, and they were made to jump through hops to all the changes that Apple push from MacOS8 to OS9 to OsX. Apple was percieved by Adobe as a crumbling company, so to survive Adobe put their products into Wintel, Apple didn’t like that. Adobe is not an Apple fan, they have their own business to worry about. However, Adobe still supports OsX with Photoshop and other products.
This has been on my Macworld Expo wishlist for the past two years now. Remember that AppleWorks, although still widely used in the Mac community (I run my home business using it….), hasn’t been updated in 3 years, while Keynote is by all means a solid and “modern” product. As far as market penetration is concearned, I think it could do very well.
With good MS Office compatiblity, the headless iMacs on the way, and bundling iWorks together with Keynote with every Mac, I’m confident this will be an insanely great year for Apple….
Meep! It turns out that Appleworks does have a database in it.
(It’s been so long since I’ve used Appleworks that I’d completely forgotten that.)
like previous poster’s comments, PDF documents are a dead end when it comes to further editing. they’re essentially a postscript document with a ‘.pdf’ extension. postscript documents describe blocks of text with x and y positioning. so any fluidity you had previous to exporting (i.e. from ms word) to postscript or pdf is lost including paragraph styles, character styles, tables, cells, etc…
in the graphics world, it’s the equivalent of a vector image (rtf,doc,mif) compared to a bitmapped image (pdf,ps).
Unfortunately, MS Office is still pretty much the standard in the corporate environment. I’ve used OO(on my linux laptop) to create documentation for my department (IT), but the file compatibility fell short, plus there were some bugs that I couldn’t stomach. Unless iWorks is completely 100 percent compatible with word and excel, and training users to move over is simple, MS dropping Mac Office would be detrimental to getting Macs onto the corporate desktop.
like previous poster’s comments, PDF documents are a dead end when it comes to further editing. they’re essentially a postscript document with a ‘.pdf’ extension. postscript documents describe blocks of text with x and y positioning. so any fluidity you had previous to exporting (i.e. from ms word) to postscript or pdf is lost including paragraph styles, character styles, tables, cells, etc…
in the graphics world, it’s the equivalent of a vector image (rtf,doc,mif) compared to a bitmapped image (pdf,ps).
PDFs are substantially more than a “postscript document with a ‘.pdf’ extension”, and if you take a look at the features of the PDF 1.6 format which is used by Acrobat 7.0 you’ll see a number of features geared towards WIP documents. The format is extremely rich compared to PostScript, and allows for things such as multimedia content and metainformation content streams which can carry all the data you wish for a word processor.
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/pdf/PDFReference16.pd…
PDFs are substantially more than a “postscript document with a ‘.pdf’ extension”, and if you take a look at the features of the PDF 1.6 format which is used by Acrobat 7.0 you’ll see a number of features geared towards WIP documents. The format is extremely rich compared to PostScript, and allows for things such as multimedia content and metainformation content streams which can carry all the data you wish for a word processor.
Those additions only make it possible to use PDF as as WP format. It doesn’t make it suitable (I know you didn’t claim that). Basically, using PDF as a WP format is a no-no, and I’d rather see the OpenOffice formats adopted, which also are structurally similar to the KeyNote format.
“Remember that AppleWorks, although still widely used in the Mac community (I run my home business using it….), hasn’t been updated in 3 years …”
Last years update:
http://www.apple.com/appleworks/update/
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11281
hylas
Seeming Confirmation?
http://www.iggsoftware.com/iwork/ now redirects you to iBiz!
iBiz: Formerly IGG Software’s “iWork”
Looks like Apple bought the name.
In July 2002 a Sun Microsystems VP announced to CNET News.com that Apple were porting StarOffice to OSX
He a few days later wrote to CNET to withdraw his claims but offered no explanation. I think the explanation has just become clear….. (Apple are famously cagy about pre-announced products)
Would an office package from Apple cause Microsoft to drop their Office suite?
I tend to think not. The rumours are about an office suite priced around the $50 mark, and bundled with all new Macs. The suite would provide the basics, and perhaps a few top features.
Compare that to MS Office, which is priced much higher and is the equivalent of about 50 Swiss Army knives for corporate users. It does pretty much everything (although I seem to need more from Excel and Word lately, but that’s another story).
I see these as different markets. People who wouldn’t pay for MS Office would get Apple’s option. Previously, they would have used AppleWorks or some other ‘small’ package, or perhaps even pirated MS Office.
If these markets are as different as I believe, then MS won’t lose any sales over this and shouldn’t run away from the Mac platform. If they do run away (at the first sign of competition), then that will be a big blow for the Mac in corporate environments, where MS Office is pretty much the standard.
Is OpenOffice an option? Not really. It tries to emulate MS Office, and apparently does fairly well. My experiences have been awful though. It crashed a lot on my new iBook, and is very slow. The worst thing though, is that they’ve managed to get all the complexity of MS Office without making a better interface. I think it’s worse than MS Office on the Mac, which is (now) quite fast and easier to use.
Other people seem happy with OpenOffice though, and they probably wouldn’t buy either Apple’s option or MS Office.
didnt someone comment that the latest versions had become more like a os within a os, as people writes “apps” useing vbscript, access backend and word and excel as frontends?
a friend of mine wrote a basic lanparty cash register app not to long ago useing vbscript inside excel…
Geez, what a kludge. PDF is an output format — any desire to make it anything else is a hopeless fantasy. A WP intermediate format and a publishing format like PDF are inherently different. The former deals with content while the latter deals with presentation. I hope Apple doesn’t make a mistake and continue to conflate the two like a certain wordprocessor, which shall remain nameless, does.
I wish Apple could buy Word Perfect, Quatro-pro, They are still great apps, they just need a company that can market them.
I’m looking forward for a Windows Version. (No don’t kill me.) I’m using Apple/ClarisWorks since Version 3 under Windows. And i currently stick with ClarisWorks 5 since its the best i think for current development. I hope there will be a new version one day…
Cheers, murphy
AppleWorks 6 for PC is only for PC. Bad Apple, Bad Apple! Only for your information…
Anouncement…
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/apr/04appleworks.html
Product description…
http://www.apple.com/education/k12/products/appleworks/
I wanted to update ClarisWorks 5 to AppleWorks 6 for PC. They don’t wanted to get me the update, because i’m not a student and i’m not living in USA.
Great thing, thanks Apple. Cheers, murphy
Geez, what a kludge. PDF is an output format — any desire to make it anything else is a hopeless fantasy. A WP intermediate format and a publishing format like PDF are inherently different. The former deals with content while the latter deals with presentation. I hope Apple doesn’t make a mistake and continue to conflate the two like a certain wordprocessor, which shall remain nameless, does.
Apple needs you buddy
(nice use of “conflate” by the way, well done!)
i just hope that apple makes sure to support this one flawlessly so we dont get a 3 way tug-o-war over office file formats…
ROFL KadyMae!! 😀
@murphy – nobody anywhere got any free update from ClarisWorks 5 to AppleWorks 6.
Yes it was:
http://news.com.com/Sun+to+push+StarOffice+for+Apples+OS+X/2100-100…
Interesting quote from the article:
“The partnership is expected to produce a Java-based version of OpenOffice by the end of the year, followed by a commercial StarOffice release sometime in 2003.”
This could be interesting if iWork is a suite of Java applications. Java on OS X is quite impressive and Java 5 on other platforms has come an awful long way. This could be much more interesting if iWork could be cross platform.
> If comparing to Word, this is a pretty good feature. I am
> a graphic designer and prefer to tweak, so this could be a
> good starting point, but I would still like to tweak to
> my heart’s (eye’s) content.
Sure. But I definitely know that those little “tweaks” get in the way of productivity and focusing on the content . I know some writers prefer to use Vi because it is most like a typewrite.
Some people have been saying that iPhoto is a carbon app, but I think I remember it being introduced after OS X came out, and hearing that it is in Cocoa. The info.plist lists an NSPrincipalClass, and Andrew Stone should know what he’s talking about:
http://www.stone.com/The_Cocoa_Files/Writing_PlugIns.html
“Look at me, all my products start with an i…”
Apple’s products without “i”:
Mac OS X
Keynote
Final Cut Express
Final Cut Pro
Logic Express
Logic Pro
DVD Studio Pro
Motion
Mail
Safari
Quicktime Player
Quicktime Pro
Soundtrack
GarageBand (and this is an iApps!!!)
PowerBook
PowerMac
Xserve
Apple’s products with “i”:
iWork (when it’s done)
iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, IDVD (and iLife)
iCal
iChat
iBook
iMac
iPod
Are you sure all Apple’s product names start with an “i”?
I hope it is not as bloated as MS Office and not as slow as Open Office
Yes, that was an update. I guess I should’ve said upgrade.
“I wish Apple could buy Word Perfect, Quatro-pro, They are still great apps, they just need a company that can market them.”
I agree with you, Worpefect suite is just a great set of Apps!!! I know Corel bought it, but they have not been too agresive or sucesful with it. Is a hard market with the MS monopoly. Look at StarOffice, is free, yet many people are hesitant to adopt it. To me every Educational institution in America should be using OO. But they don’t they rather pay lots of money to MS.
Apple, probably would not gain much from buying WP suite though, the last WP for Mac is outdated, and they would have to port it and they already have a more accesible product. But a company like IBM, or of such caliber, should by it, and offer it. That would be great.
Where is your usual polemic “verve”? 😛
Neooffice/J, a version of Openoffice, just went Beta. It works without all the problems of Openofice for X.
It works as fast on my iMac 350 Mhz as the other Office application, and it integrates with Aqua.
Is it too little too late?
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
Check out the app they call Delicious Library. If you’re gunning for a DVD library, this one probably has the most gee-whiz features.
It’s about damned time in my opinion. After ALLLLLL these years. I wonder what took Apple so long to decide to finally do this. I know what everyone will say. iPod! iPod! iPod! Although it’s good that something finally got them to do it, it just seems ironic to me that an music player is changing the computing industry and not an actual computer. (Yes, I know the iPod is a >computer< but so is my microwave.)
For business people to take Apple seriously, they need to create a database like Access.
You notice how MS does not include that critical application for the Mac version of MS Office. That is not a mere omission on their part. IT departments use it all the time for quick development. Why write a whole application from scratch every time? A proper business style database would do wonders for Apple’s attempt to penetrate the business sector.
As a business owner, I must confess to using VPC because of this problem.
NO, Filemaker pro is not cutting the mustard anymore. They need one with real SQL (inner/outer joins), relational tables, RealBasic (something to move from VBA), and data migration tools to bring applications from MS Access. Filemaker pro is like MAC classic! It has a nice interface, but peoples needs have changed, and they really must have something more powerful.
I don’t know anything about Mac’s but I need to move some data to a friends Mac using an external USB hard drive. Is NTFS recognized on OSX, or do I need to reformat with FAT? Also, does OSX recognize any Linux filesystems? EXT2 perhaps? If so that would be sweet cos I have EXT2 drivers for XP.
One last thing: in case all the above fails, does software like macdrive, conversions plus (or something else) recognize a Mac hard drive partition on a USB drive?
I agree with you (sigh…) Even on my Linux box I run MS Office through Wine. OOo is just not there yet, here’s to hoping that OOo 2 is much improved!
OSX will mount a NTFS disc, however, it was at one time limited to just reading NTFS and not writing. But panther could have changed that….
Why should Apple devote resources to a new Office suite? Microsoft pretty much owns the market. I wouldn’t use Windows if you paid me, but Office 2004 is pretty good software, and is compatible with the Windows versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Any competitor will always have translation problems, and that isn’t acceptable for people who need to swap files with Windows users.
I wish that iWorks push the OASIS XML Open Document Format.
For business people to take Apple seriously, they need to create a database like Access.
I agree with you that MacOsX needs some RAD database frontend tool like MSAccess.
However, having worked with MSAccess in buisness environments several times, I wouldn’t use it (or rather the JET-engine) as a database.
MSAccess suffers the same problem as almost all MS products: it looks shiny at first, but turns out to be bad after a while. In the case of MSAccess it is the lake of reliability (which is the most important requirement for a database).
There are several good and way more functional and secure database solution for OSX now (from Oracle10g to PostgreSQL).
IT departments use it all the time for quick development.
We currently use such a “quick” MSAccess database in a project and we pay for it. Dealing with all the trouble we have with it wasn’t worth the “quick”. Our next version will be JET-engine free…
iWorks would enable M$ software free mac clinets in an office…
There’s no such thing as “mac clients in an office…” Macs are poison to businesses.
“For business people to take Apple seriously, they need to create a database like Access.”
It’s called Filemaker folks…and version 7 beats the pants off Access anyday.
Easy to develop and easy to support.
It can talk to SQL also.
“There’s no such thing as “mac clients in an office…” Macs are poison to businesses.”
I manage 300 Macs and 7 Xserves in a business.