Apple on Thursday released substantial updates for its iWork suite of applications on all its platforms: iOS, Mac, and the Web. There are a lot of changes in these updates—here are the major ones.
– Pages, Numbers and Keynote now take advantage of new features recently introduced in iOS 9, including Split View, Slide View, and Picture in Picture and 3D Touch on the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
– The apps are now more accessible than ever with greater support for VoiceOver, the remarkable screen reader that comes standard on iOS devices and Macs, and provides users an audio description of what’s happening on screen, as well as guidance for initiating actions when creating, editing or formatting a document.
– And iWork for iCloud is now out of beta. We’ve added a host of new features like commenting, version history and support for 10 additional languages that make the collaboration experience on the web much more powerful.
Other new features include:
– El Capitan users can now multitask in Split View and get haptic feedback as they edit a document using a Force Touch trackpad
– Shared iWork documents can now be previewed on iOS and Android browsers
– iWork for iOS and iWork for iCloud now include version history
– Longtime iWork customers can now open and edit documents from iWork ’08 and ’06 across all three platforms
– Keynote for iOS allows customers to edit and present in portrait orientation
– Keynote for Mac and iOS now include full bidirectional support for Arabic and Hebrew
You can download the updates by opening the App Store on your Mac or iOS device and checking for updates. These are free updates for all existing users.
And yet still we have to have a Keynote icon in iCloud even if we literally never used the product. I say it’s still in beta. 🙂
Oh look. I can do small caps again!
It is really strange, sad actually, that Pages still does not support vertical text layout after all these years and iOS/OS X core OS text layout framework (CoreText, etc.) improvements. Apple used to lead the way with advanced typography, but that was a long time ago. Oh well, the only choice for Japanese word processing remains Microsoft Word which does support vertical layout on OS X and iOS.
Yeah, and it is not just Japanese. The only reason I still need damned MS Office on every machine is that Numbers or Pages can’t rotate text in cells, something QuattroPro did 20 years ago…
It’s nice they are doing updates once in a while, but the pace the iWork apps are developing at is pathetic. Apple drops the ball on most non-OS software, Logic and FinalCut excluded. Photos, iTunes, iWork, Calendar, Mail… not one of them is remotely what it could be.
And as long as we’re bitching, sure wish they’d put Outline mode back into Pages.
Also, the WhatsNew says: “Delete, duplicate, and reorder sections using the page navigator”. Anybody know what/where this is?