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Does this require a Monthly License like Microsoft and adobe want to do?

No. It's part of iCloud, which is free unless you need more than 5gb of storage. Of course, you don't get most benefits of iCloud unless you're invested in Apple gear. As long as you're not so upset with Apple that you want a divorce, you can consider iCloud to be one of the perks that keeps you in the marriage and buying expensive anniversary presents. ;)

In fairness, both Microsoft and Adobe are selling software. They either sell customers expensive software packages up front, or sell it to them on the installment plan. What's the "free" alternative, pop-up ads while you're trying to edit your photos for a publication deadline or finish up a presentation for the sales conference?
 
Yawn. Wake me up when Apple releases the fully-updated Mac-native version of iWork 13, or whatever they want to call it, which is way waaay overdue.

Not gonna use a web browser for office productivity apps...would rather use a web browser for, uh, web browsing.
 
I'm just as afraid as you are, and I live in the USA.

But they aren't allowed to snoop on US citizens - allegedly :p

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Unless I've missed something, this suffers from the same problem as any app which stores documents in iCloud and that is that the documents are only accessible to the app. They really need to make iCloud storage more like DropBox etc.

I've just accessed Numbers in icloud here at work (on a Windows box) and it won't let me edit a spreadsheet I created last night at home. It only gives me the option to download, delete, or duplicate it and if I select download it only gives me the option to d/l as a Numbers file, PDF and Excel are disabled - not a lot of use in Windows :confused:
 
As a freelance journalist I can tell you since getting the email that iCloud beta was open for developers I have been using it much more than I ever expected, and with a lot of traveling planned this summer I am sure I will continue to use it.
 
I have been testing Pages and Numbers for a day now, and like what I see. I've had enough of the big G (and the big M) and it's great to have seamless apps on all my Apple devices.

Imports from Office seem to work well and the formatting issues have been improved. All of which bodes well for the upcoming desktop updates.
 
While you do have to be a registered developer, you don't have to be on their payed tiers. A free developer account would do! :apple:

How do you register? I am in Safari developer program and i can't sign in beta i work cloud.

Looks like all but developers got invite.
 
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I've been trying this. It is VERY basic. Google Docs is far ahead. But this is just a beta of the first release. Maybe in a few years this will catch up to Google Docs.

Nope, Google Docs can't work offline. With iworks you can and sync.
It also has better formatting and im/export than google docs.
 
Been trying it for a few days and seems to work nice, the question is :eek: will people pay for iwork on Mac now ? You dont need the app installed nor it check anything.
 
I've been trying this. It is VERY basic. Google Docs is far ahead. But this is just a beta of the first release. Maybe in a few years this will catch up to Google Docs.

they are playing catchup in so many fields. considering how much effort they have spent on iwork since it was released i dont see this being anything than a nuisance for their users.

was testing numbers and found it very slow, unresponsive and basic as you say and its a minor thing but all the dialogs i found too child like.

am i the only who is not a huge fan of their implementation of tables?

all these new products by apple where i would say their intentions arent pure remind me of a scene in a simpsons episode (before it went crap)

Bart: Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class
and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they
are? [making "crazy" gesture] Cuckoo.


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Nope, Google Docs can't work offline. With iworks you can and sync.
It also has better formatting and im/export than google docs.

its getting there

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/1628467?hl=en

how does it have better formatting and import/export?
 
[/COLOR]

its getting there

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/1628467?hl=en

how does it have better formatting and import/export?[/QUOTE]
Well but it is not there in reality. So don't help.

Regarding formating and import export, i have multiple more complex word documents and i imported them into google docs and pages.
In pages they look like the word version, in google docs, the layout was blown.
Exporting to word format from pages lead to the nearly identical word document (in look, some fonts where changed).
Exporting to word format from google docs made it worse.
 
they are playing catchup in so many fields. considering how much effort they have spent on iwork since it was released i dont see this being anything than a nuisance for their users.

Apple isn't playing catchup. Documents in a web browser wasn't their business. But with all the attacks of Google against Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others, where they clearly do things just to interfere with potential competitors in the advertising market without any intent of making money, Apple has started to strike back. No money to Google anymore for search (welcome, Bing!). No money to Google anymore for maps. Fragment the online application market with iWork for iCloud.
 
Apple isn't playing catchup. Documents in a web browser wasn't their business. But with all the attacks of Google against Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others, where they clearly do things just to interfere with potential competitors in the advertising market without any intent of making money, Apple has started to strike back. No money to Google anymore for search (welcome, Bing!). No money to Google anymore for maps. Fragment the online application market with iWork for iCloud.

sorry if apple wants the desktop app to be a real alternative to office, libreoffice and google docs its gonna be playing catchup. note they havent improved it much in years which i believe is the opposite of what you want to do when you are entering a new market.

if it wants its online iworks to be a real alternative to google docs its gonna be playing catchup.

it is entering a new market here and with maps and more and the best interest of their customers isnt what they are thinking about.

apple is only striking back against its customers by giving them inferior apps which some assume live up to apple quality.

their latest macos and ios additions are ripped from competitor products. apple is complacent and certainly not on its toes.
 
Apple isn't playing catchup. Documents in a web browser wasn't their business. But with all the attacks of Google against Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others, where they clearly do things just to interfere with potential competitors in the advertising market without any intent of making money, Apple has started to strike back. No money to Google anymore for search (welcome, Bing!). No money to Google anymore for maps. Fragment the online application market with iWork for iCloud.

Although i agree that iWork in the cloud was not apples business, i don't agree with "they strike back".
It is more a situation like "How does it make sense for our customers".

See working with google docs on ipad is not fun at all, regardless of all the other shortcomings of google docs (by the way it is interesting if you read something like "Microsoft office can do much more and in the next sentence u read use google docs which can't do all the stuff either)

For apple customers it means
buy iworks for a relative cheap price (or only part of it),
you can use it on your mac, you can use it on your phone or tablet with sync thanks to icloud. And hey if you are at a location where you don't have access to your devices, you can modify it also on the browser.

So for apple it is a logical extension of their services for the customer. And thats everything i think is behind it. Because google docs to microsoft and back is already extremely annoying and bad. Adding another step is much worse.
Now you have one toolchain you can use. I like that really, because it saves much time and effort.

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sorry if apple wants the desktop app to be a real alternative to office, libreoffice and google docs its gonna be playing catchup. note they havent improved it much in years which i believe is the opposite of what you want to do when you are entering a new market.

if it wants its online iworks to be a real alternative to google docs its gonna be playing catchup.
dont see any real problems with iworks where they need to catchup.
Office is bloated with 90% features less than 10% of the users really use.
Libreoffice and openoffice are just free versions of office.
With worse usability but they are just cheap as in free.

Pages/Numbers/Keynote is not office, it is reduced to what most people need.
Adding useless features is simple, everyone can write features regardless how useless they are. And that leads to software like office ... thousands of useless features, some basic features not working as good as they can and some features for experts that are really worth the money.

The best thing apple can do is make the basic features perfect.
Because experts whcih do need expert features will use office, regardless of the price or system. And all other users have a affordable and better usable alternative.

Don't know why apple should change this. Truth is, if Apple would bloat iWorks, it would not longer worth the money. Because you can't make it work like office, so you can't replace office with it if you need the features.

So go apple go, you are doing it right. But i am sure apple knows that
 
Thank you MacRumors for pointing this out! My Apple ID is with another family member's email so I would not have known about this.
 
Been trying it for a few days and seems to work nice, the question is :eek: will people pay for iwork on Mac now ? You dont need the app installed nor it check anything.

It's that good?! Wow. I am a developer and have not yet received an invite. I can't wait to at least try it out.
 
This might work for relatively short, simple documents. But, to maintain compatibility, the browser, desktop, and iOS versions of the iWork apps would have to support the same, lowest-common-denominator feature set, and that's a significant limitation. Another issue is that in order to work with large media files (e.g., movies in Keynote presentations) you need a lot of bandwidth. Until those hurdles are overcome, I'll create and edit almost all of my Keynote slideshows on my Macs. Still, this is good news, especially if Apple releases a new version of iWork this year - it's long overdue.
 
I played around with Pages for a while. I worked on a few of my current Pages documents stored in iCloud and dragged in a Word document from my desktop. The interface is clean and intuitive, and looks similar enough to the Mac version of Pages that most people will be instantly at home with it.

Since it's just a beta, there are a lot of features missing. Tables and columns, for instance, will appear in a pre-made document but cannot be edited. If you click on a currently non-supported element, you get a notice in the Inspector saying that the feature is coming soon.

When iWork for iCloud is fully functional, it's going to be really nice. There's just that pesky little problem of having to be continually online. So I can see myself using this more as a backup and a way to make documents easily portable from device to device.
 
But they aren't allowed to snoop on US citizens - allegedly :p

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Unless I've missed something, this suffers from the same problem as any app which stores documents in iCloud and that is that the documents are only accessible to the app. They really need to make iCloud storage more like DropBox etc.

I've just accessed Numbers in icloud here at work (on a Windows box) and it won't let me edit a spreadsheet I created last night at home. It only gives me the option to download, delete, or duplicate it and if I select download it only gives me the option to d/l as a Numbers file, PDF and Excel are disabled - not a lot of use in Windows :confused:

If you can't edit your files online, then you are not using the beta vesion of iCloud. You're still using the old (not beta) iCloud.
 
But they aren't allowed to snoop on US citizens - allegedly :p

----------

Unless I've missed something, this suffers from the same problem as any app which stores documents in iCloud and that is that the documents are only accessible to the app. They really need to make iCloud storage more like DropBox etc.

I've just accessed Numbers in icloud here at work (on a Windows box) and it won't let me edit a spreadsheet I created last night at home. It only gives me the option to download, delete, or duplicate it and if I select download it only gives me the option to d/l as a Numbers file, PDF and Excel are disabled - not a lot of use in Windows :confused:

Hi you have to go to beta.icloud.com on www.icloud.com iworks is not enabled.

Second regarding iCloud.
iCloud is NOT dropbox.
It is a synching mechanism, not a filestorage mechanism.

See icloud as automatic synch of documents/settings and more per application and dropbox as a fully featured harddisk.

iCloud could be working like dropbox, that's true, but i think iCloud will go into a rather different direction than dropbox.
 
I have two accounts. One is a paid developer account, and the other is a regular iTunes account. I got an invite a day or so ago to the regular iTunes account. I've accidentally logged into the dev portal in the past using it, but it isn't a paid developer account.

So, you might be able to get an invite just by signing up for the free dev account.
 
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