The interface usually stinks. I always marvel, when in Google Docs, that you can actually do this, like making a dog learn how to sing. They can do it, just not very well. Give me a computer. An iOS device for short work. If God meant us to edit in a browser, he would have written us in javascript.
iCloud beta seems to be showing promise. If it operates as promised, I can see it potentially being a boon to our associates when they are in the field.
We've swapped Office with iWork and had zero problems at our firm. Most of our clients use Windows and so far have never suspected we use anything other than Office.
Occasionally, we run into viruses.....in Word docs sent to us. Thankfully, we are all Macs. We use a virus scanner that flags the viruses, thus preventing us from the embarrassment of passing along infected files to clients.
It's not completely full-featured, if you take Word as the standard, but it's very sleek and usable for most things. If you're writing a thesis, with a thousand footnotes, and illustrations, and multiple parallel columns -- a page layout program -- you can use Word. Most of the time it's way too bloated for what I need.
Has anyone experimented (or read documentation) to see whether the content updates it sends to iCloud are delta updates?
I have to imagine they are, at least as you actively work on something. Otherwise it would be constantly uploading the entire document over and over. Still, it would be neat to see someone open something like a 100MB Keynote file and change a word or two and see how long that takes to update.
And if the first edit takes a long time, then see if subsequent edits (while the file remains open) are faster.
I think I remember hearing Jobs say that. Really, it's part of Versions, which is delta too. So, you change a paragraph and seconds later your backup and your iCloud gets the delta and adds it to your file a few seconds later. That way, it doesn't take up too much bandwidth. And your Time Machine backup, and the full series of Versions, are on the computer and the external hard drive, too. And once it's on iCloud, the file gets to your iPhone or iPad. That's what's cool for me.
