Job Postings and Patent Acquisitions Hint at Potential Overhaul of iLife and iWork

[Cole Slaw]

Wow, I thought Apple didn't really care about their (non iOS) software anymore.

[powers74]

Originally Posted by sfoalex

get rid of the stupid inspector, lose all the separate windows for things like Fonts. Clean it up, it's all over the place.

I love the inspector, but agree it's a little scattered. It's like Adobe's options windows only way more streamlined and less twitchy. And unlike Adobe's stuff, at least they're all consistent across all the apps. I say just put the colors, fonts & whatever the other one or two separate windows are either into the inspector window or combine them into their own. I realize why they do the color & font windows the way they do though, since it's a system wide window that any app can use. That way it's easy to know how to use it in any app that implements it. But improvements are always welcome and I think Ive will be a good influence on UI.

[RoelJuun]

I want iPhoto to use the same file handling as iTunes. But Apple will probably use the new patents and a complete new system, yet I don't know whether I will like it when released…

[wizard]

Numbers certainly needs an overhaul but five or six years ago when development started on this version I believe they achieved their goal which was a simple spread sheet app. Today things are far different, people do more with their Macs and thus a more professional Numbers is required.

Originally Posted by numlock

skeuomorphism and the aesthetics is one thing but what exactly has stopped them from having numbers as usable and competent application?

its got some nice drag and drop solutions but when it comes to actual work i will go to openoffice/libreoffice and google docs every time.

Personally I hate OpenOffice but that is me. I'm really looking forward to a version of Numbers with a built in scripting language like Python. Numbers needs a lot of work when it comes to imports and exports. Frankly I'd like to see a version of Numbers that can easily turn a range of cells into HTML.

[HenryDJP]

Originally Posted by sfoalex

Apple won't even get 1% of Microsoft's Office business with iWork, also known as iWorthless. Adopt top menus, get rid of the stupid inspector, lose all the separate windows for things like Fonts. Clean it up, it's all over the place. I can't believe anyone in here even remotely likes it at all.

Well I do use it. Pages only though. I can tell you first hand that Pages is fantastic in regards to creating flyers, posters and banners for my insurance office. I would just like Apple to offer more templates. MS Word on the other hand is hardly used much past typing letters and office publications. This has been the same for every company I've worked for.
I agree with you and others that iWork needs a serious upgrade and I'm disappointed that Apple has ignored it so much but I do think you're showing more hate than necessary. I don't think people love MS Office that much. It's just that as an industry we're stuck with it because MS has a monopoly.

[Rogifan]

Originally Posted by Shaun, UK

Assuming there is going to be an OS11. I still think they are going to merge iOS and OSX at some point in the future.

Either way I hope we don't have to wait that long. If they are just hiring people now it doesn't bode well given the time it takes to develop new software. We are looking at 2 years min before any new release if that's the case.

I really do think it's time Apple spun off their software business into a separate company or merge it into their Filemaker business. It's the only way we are going to see any serious software development again.

What has Tim Cook ever said that leads you to believe OSX and iOS are going to be merged? Isn't Tim Cook the one out there slamming Surface and convergence devices as being poor design choices that leave you with a severely compromised product?

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Originally Posted by HenryDJP

Well I do use it. Pages only though. I can tell you first hand that Pages is fantastic in regards to creating flyers, posters and banners for my insurance office. I would just like Apple to offer more templates. MS Word on the other hand is hardly used much past typing letters and office publications. This has been the same for every company I've worked for.
I agree with you and others that iWork needs a serious upgrade and I'm disappointed that Apple has ignored it so much but I do think you're showing more hate than necessary. I don't think people love MS Office that much. It's just that as an industry we're stuck with it because MS has a monopoly.

I don't know anyone in my office that loves Word or PowerPoint. In fact most times when we have t use it we're cursing under our breath as we do.

[The Bulge]

Originally Posted by nagromme

(Example: OS X's Finder sidebar icon like Home and Desktop that used to have colored sidebar icons. Now they're all the same blue-gray and you've lost a visual cue that made them quicker to find and click. Compare to the Go menu which still has the colors. "Like" them or not, those colors were useful!)

Bad example in my opinion. It's more muscle memory in my case than visual cue. I really care not what colour it is, because it is equally easy to navigate.

[fel10]

About time. Especially for iPhoto. That thing needs a serious facelift.

[tubular]

I use Keynote regularly, Numbers regularly, Pages when I have to do documents destined for paper.

For a while, some interesting things have been buried in the equally buried "Typography" panel in Pages. If you have OpenType fonts with, say, real small caps (i.e. Hoefler Text), you could select them rather than having Pages fake them up by scaling the full-size caps. Lots of other typographic niceties there too. But the menu was pretty clunky, and didn't do a very good job in calling out what the available typographic features were. It was a bit of a hack. And then in Lion in lost most of even those limited capabilities.

If you're going to redesign Pages, Apple, please take the typographic features of OpenType fonts seriously!

Also, it's strange that Apple spent so much time designing a bidirectional text algorithm - that would let you stick in Arabic or Hebrew into an otherwise left-to-right doc - and implemented it in TextEdit but not Pages.

So that's my little niche request - better interface to OpenType features (which right now takes either an Adobe $oftware $uite of $ome $ort or the nerdy joys of XeLatex), and bidi.

[wizard]

Originally Posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

Why? It wouldn't be faster you know.

Actually it could be faster. This is the odd thing about i86 hardware going 64 bit opens up more hardware features than going 64 bit on other platforms. As such some apps can leverage the 64 bit Intel hardware for significantly Improved performance. Beyond that you eliminate the issue of working within a 32 bit address space.

[BruceEBonus]

Lets hope New Apple (post-Jobs) dont cock this up like they've wrecked the current hardware line ups and unnecessary dock connectors, etc.

Any more eyes off the ball mistakes and they'll be seeing the ol' customer base dropping further ...

[Simmias]

Overall, this is great news, but I hope Apple is much farther along in updating iWork and iLife than this story would indicate. I don't find it plausible that they are just now starting work on this after 4 years of no major iWork update.

It is also likely that the new versions of iLife and iWork would lose the skeuomorphisms - emulation of real-life objects and materials like desk calendars, leather and wood. There have long been tensions within Apple over this approach, but with skeuomorphism proponent Scott Forstall being forced out of Apple and Jonathan Ive having now assumed responsibility for Human Interface aspects of software as well as hardware design, a new design direction for Apple's software may be in progress.

This is just sensationalized speculation and not supported by anything in the story. Please stop bringing up this stupid meme of "Ive's minimalism" vs. "Forestall's skeumorphism". There is no evidence to show that Ive is opposed to software having textures or ties to the real world. What is even skeupmorphic about iWork? This notion that Ive is going to remove all color and texture from their apps because some tech pundits don't "get" skeumorphism is just silly. Ive will polish and scale back some of the excesses of Apple's design, but there is nothing to indicate a change in strategy.

a file sorting system that can reorganize according to time, category, or a common theme -- such as a work project -- and sync with cloud servers and other users

I hope people will now stop talking about iCloud being fundamentally flawed because you cannot organize multiple files types by project. As this shows, Apple is already working on a solution for this use case as well as sharing and collaboration. Give them some credit...and some time to get this all working.

[wizard]

Originally Posted by pancakedrawer

iWork still can't compete with Word and Excel for anything longer than a few pages of pretty text and pictures. It seriously lacks any advanced features and for novices, the 'inspector' seems ancient compared with Microsoft's content aware ribbons.

As for iPhoto, it's crazy that it can't even work seamlessly with the iPhoto app on the iPad, although that point has been made plenty of times before.

Your comment on iPhoto hits a sore spot with me. Between the behavior of the iOS variants and the Mac OS variants I'm tempted to look elsewhere. In the case of the iOS variants it is almost like Apple has some sort of anti user zealot designing iPhotos interaction with iCloud. iCloud is a good concept executed terribly wrong on iOS devices, especially in the context of iPhoto. At the very least they need a clean way to designate photos as being in the cloud uniquely or duplicated there from the originating machine. To put it plainly you don't always want your photos on the cloud.

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Originally Posted by Simmias

Overall, this is great news, but I hope Apple is much farther along in updating iWork and iLife than this story would indicate. I don't find it plausible that they are just now starting work on this after 4 years of no major iWork update.

Why not? It isn't un characteristic of Apple to let software stew for years.

This is just sensationalized speculation and not supported by anything in the story. Please stop bringing up this stupid meme of "Ive's minimalism" vs. "Forestall's skeumorphism". There is no evidence to show that Ive is opposed to software having textures or ties to the real world. What is even skeupmorphic about iWork? This notion that Ive is going to remove all color and texture from their apps because some tech pundits don't "get" skeumorphism is just silly. Ive will polish and scale back some of the excesses of Apple's design, but there is nothing to indicate a change in strategy.

On this we will see.

I hope people will now stop talking about iCloud being fundamentally flawed because you cannot organize multiple files types by project. As this shows, Apple is already working on a solution for this use case as well as sharing and collaboration. Give them some credit...and some time to get this all working.

iCloud has so may issues that one can only see it as fundamentally flawed. ICloud only really works well for apps that sync very specific data and frankly sucks when it comes to productivity app usage.

[TheralSadurns]

Originally Posted by sfoalex

Apple won't even get 1% of Microsoft's Office business with iWork, also known as iWorthless. Adopt top menus, get rid of the stupid inspector, lose all the separate windows for things like Fonts. Clean it up, it's all over the place. I can't believe anyone in here even remotely likes it at all.

With all displays being widescreen now... and moving from 16:10 to 16:9... I just HATE the ribbon. It's the single most stupid idea...for an App that is used to write US Letter or A4 sheets. The height of any given display is limited enough as is. Stick the non-customizable ribbon on top... and all that remains is 1/4 of a page. A sidebar in whatever form , inspector or otherwise is MUCH more logical.

[cambox]

iLife flat lined years ago! ___________ Code Blue! Stat!

If revived it could be brain damaged as its been tooooo long!

[sambaman1]

For the new iLife, Apple should take the time to offer quality, "it-just-works", migration paths for legacy iLife projects.

In that regard, some apple migration paths were great (e.g., from PowerPC, Mac OS 9, etc), others were not (from iMovieHD, iWeb, HomePage, .Mac, etc).

For example, when migrating projects from iMovieHD to iMovie, only the original source video is imported,
any changes you’ve made to the video and anything you’ve added to it—such as music, titles, and special effects—aren’t imported!
(http://help.apple.com/imovie/#mov39f853b1).

That was not acceptable.

[mrsir2009]

[/COLOR]

Originally Posted by HenryDJP

Well I do use it. Pages only though. I can tell you first hand that Pages is fantastic in regards to creating flyers, posters and banners for my insurance office. I would just like Apple to offer more templates. MS Word on the other hand is hardly used much past typing letters and office publications. This has been the same for every company I've worked for.
I agree with you and others that iWork needs a serious upgrade and I'm disappointed that Apple has ignored it so much but I do think you're showing more hate than necessary. I don't think people love MS Office that much. It's just that as an industry we're stuck with it because MS has a monopoly.

+1. Considering the price ($19.99) pages has a much higher value for money than MS Word ($300).

[genemaster]

3 years in the waiting...about time! And PLEASE Apple, bring back iWeb to iLife.

[MasterHowl]

About time!!!

iWork lacks certain critical features (I don't think I need to remind people of that though...). I wonder if they'll provide iWork updates for free if you've already bought it through the App Store? Or maybe it'll be a small upgrade purchase (much like the OS upgrades)

[tubular]

What are the "critical features" that iWork lacks, in your view?

[Rogifan]

Originally Posted by Simmias

This is just sensationalized speculation and not supported by anything in the story. Please stop bringing up this stupid meme of "Ive's minimalism" vs. "Forestall's skeumorphism". There is no evidence to show that Ive is opposed to software having textures or ties to the real world. What is even skeupmorphic about iWork? This notion that Ive is going to remove all color and texture from their apps because some tech pundits don't "get" skeumorphism is just silly. Ive will polish and scale back some of the excesses of Apple's design, but there is nothing to indicate a change in strategy.

There was that article in fastcodesign.com prior to Forstall getting the boot that claimed Ive was squarely in the anti Skeuomorphic camp.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/...cause-a-revolt
..."It’s visual masturbation," says one former senior UI designer at Apple who worked closely with Steve Jobs. "It’s like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?"

Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process....

New York Times reported something similar:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/te...anted=all&_r=0
...“You can be sure that the next generation of iOS and OS X will have Jony’s industrial design aesthetic all over them,” said a designer who works at Apple but declined to be named as he is not allowed to speak publicly. “Clean edges, flat surfaces will likely replace the textures that are all over the place right now.”...

[miniroll32]

Skeuomorphism itself isn't the problem; it's the level of it that exists.

There are countless examples of where Apple products have benefited from this initiative in small doses, but it's probably only been over the past 2/3 years where it has become more of a hinderance than an improvement. For example, how does a 'virtual' shredder - with animation - make you feel any more secure that a Passbook card has been deleted? Can you imagine in OSX a Pages document being virtually 'scrumbled' on screen and thrown into a bin?

[Michaelgtrusa]

Originally Posted by bedifferent

Increase the amount of engineers instead of straining their teams. Apple has a history of hiring engineers that can be shifted around departments as needed. Why bother? Just hire enough engineers for iOS, OS X, iLife, Aperture, iWork, etc development instead of moving around an already strained group. It would improve quality, increase updates cycles (iWork 09 and iLife 11 should have been updated a long time ago). iOS gets a lot of work due to its popularity/need, OS X and associated suites need the same tender loving .

....and Lion was a mess.

[CJM]

Well... About time I would say. Clean UI is the in thing this decade. Just look at Office 2013, Chrome etc. - apps have lost their shiny embossed logos. Apple needs to do some flattening.

[chadley_chad]

Bring back iWeb ... Let's see some innovation Apple!