by iCloud reached 300 million users already in it’s relatively short life already. It took Facebook five years to reach the same figure. So what do you do next to empower users to make more of the cloud service? Introducing iWork for iCloud.
The statistics are quite simply mind boggling when you think about it. iCloud enables all of your purchases available on all your iOS devices which now includes iTunes TV and Movies. Content has been downloaded a mind boggling 35 billion times but the figures don’t stop there.
Game centre has managed to rack up 240 million users, 60 of the top 100 games on the App Store support game centre right within the game. The scale of which iCloud can handle data is immense dealing with 800 million iMessages and a simply mind bending 7.4 trillion push notifications. So what next for all that iCloud prowess?
Introducing iWork For iCloud
iCloud allows Apple to integrate so many cloud features across their multiple product ranges, in both OS X and iOS. Now Apple take their iWork suite to the cloud to directly take on Google and Microsofts cloud based offerings.
iWork For iCloud Details
“Create beautiful documents right in your browser. On Mac or PC.”
IWork is going to get an update later on this year for both the Mac and iOS.
Apple today showed us what iWork for iCloud is capable off, bring one of the nicest interfaces for creating documents in the cloud right to the mac and PC.
iWork is available from within the control panel you get when logging into iCloud. Three new icons will take you to the respective application, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
It’s hard to tell from the demonstration just how speedy and effective it’ll be to work from a web based system that’s doing quite a lot or what cpu power is needed but it seems to be swift enough. I’ll bet they had a fat data connection to keep things smooth however.
From first glances you have a document on the left and a full height inspector bar where you change properties of text, formatting, insertions etc etc. Missing from the demonstration was to see if you can create your own document formatting types.
Masking of images is baked right in there along with being able to drag and drop images from your desktop right into the editing window.
iWork for iCloud and Microsoft Office?
No matter how successful the Apple Mac range one thing will always remain true the fact that Microsoft office and in particularly Microsoft word rules the roost. So how well do Microsoft Word documents cope with being imported into iWork?
Personnel was founded to be hit and miss affair especially with versions of Microsoft office from 2010 onwards. Formatting is normally the first thing to fall foul of importing second to the lack of Microsoft fonts which you then have to dig around on the Internet for and install.
As pretty much the same with image editing you can simply drag and drop Microsoft documents into iWork for iCloud and it will automatically convert the document. What wasn’t covered is if iWork has the ability to export office documents.
Numbers In The Cloud
This is one of the quicker demonstrations of the keynotes but unsurprisingly so. After all, who really wants to see a presentation of spreadsheet software? Or was good to see is that when you enter into = within a cell and then start typing the formula, on the right hand side help and the syntax of the command starts to appear.
Keynote
Again there was a really much time is spent demonstrating this part of iWork but there was considerable focus on the ability to drag-and-drop images from desktop, mask and clip images.
What was impressive is when viewing a presentation it does all manner of fancy 3-D effects right within the browser something that Apple is very rightly proud of as Safari has obviously had some impressive optimisations applied. No mentions of Html 5, web gl or any web technologies just a good old fashioned, this is what you can do as a user style demonstration.
In a very un-applelike move all of these features were demonstrated in the Google Chrome browser. What makes it even more interesting is that they run Windows 8. Was this apple firing a shot across the bows at Microsoft for not bringing office to the iPad?
iWork for iCloud availability.
Starting today all of these features are available if you’re a developer in the guise of the beta. The public beta will be available this year but no announcement of when it will be officially available for everyone.
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