I’ve never been a huge fan of Microsoft Office, but at least Redmond comes out with a new version every once in a while and makes us feel like something is being done. iWork is still stuck in 2009 and Apple hasn’t even bothered to release a roadmap/plan/guide/anything to tell us about any future updates.
At the minimum, I’m hoping they at least get the suite to work properly with iCloud. I can’t begin to tell you how annoyed/frustrated I became when creating a Keynote presentation on my Mac and hoping that it would appear on my iPad and iPhone. It didn’t work. Yes, after lots of research, I learned that (at least with Keynote) you can only sync Keynote presentations you create on your Mac by going to iCloud.com and then manually uploading the presentations. To me that does not equal “It just works.”
Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple and their products, but when it comes to the software side of things, they are lacking. OS X Lion still has a lot of annoying bugs, iCloud/Photostream work most of the time, iPhoto is slow and eats up enormous amounts of space, iWork is still way behind Microsoft Office and they really screwed up Final Cut Pro in the latest version. Hardware is beautiful, but come on people, you are the biggest company in the world now and we are still stuck with a three year old version of your productivity suite!
To be more specific, there are still a lot of things that bother me about this old version of iWork:
1. The grammar and spell check sucks. I normally have to copy my text to some online spell checker or even use Office to make sure it’s properly corrected.
2. There is no AutoSave option for those people not running Lion. That’s like Microsoft saying your Word documents will only be autosaved if you upgrade to Windows 7. Why does the operating system matter!?
3. The programs still crash occasionally, which is just unacceptable!
Anyway, what are your thoughts on iWork and when (or if) Apple will be releasing a new version of the suite?
Apple has, however, released a few updates for iWork 09′ which has resolved all of the issues I found. But have to agree, it almost feels like Apple has half given up on any new revamped iWork. Apple will probably release any new features to iWork via the App Store (as users now have to get iWork through there now) so we probably will never see iWork 12′
What about LibreOffice? It seems to be a wonderful option.
When I see office running on a PC, I just want to go back to old PC days. Microsoft Access, project, visio.. these all have lousy equivalents on mac. The way excel runs on a PC, it just doesn’t run the same on a mac. Just beautiful hardware is not enough, we want to see some investment on software as well.