Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Developing Numbers?

Risky Chicken said:
It's a presentation and numerical modelling package. Think of GarageBand for numbers or Mathematica Lite and join that with a way of visualizing the results.

See here for more:
http://www.riskychicken.com/stories/2005/06/19/applesNumberIsUp.html

Risky Chicken
www.riskychicken.com
Click to expand...

It would be a darn shame if this is true.

A simple spreadsheet has a lot of potential uses, and would appeal to a very wide user base. It would round Apple's productivity suite off nicely.

Numerical modelling would appeal to a very limited few...

[Edit]

OK, I visited the 'Risky chicken' site, and I just don't agree with their theory. If you want a nifty graphing app to show off coreimage, we already have the graphing calculator.

Numbers is a spreadsheet. End of.
 
Grapher

>OK, I visited the 'Risky chicken' site, and I just don't agree with their theory. If you want a nifty graphing app to show off coreimage, we already have the graphing calculator. <

Since Tiger, at least, a mini-mathmatica is in the utilities folder. It's called Grapher and is far more complicated than a lot of people need.

Numbers will be based off a spreadsheet program. There is no need for a mathmatica style program to be included with the iwork suite. A database and spreadsheet are far more important.


Of course, Apple will include things with the typical Apple twist. Expect the database to be similar to the Amigas' Gold Disk data software from long ago, which let you change the way your data was displayed. (Think Keynote themes and templates for how the graph or data will be displayed and made available to Pages and Keynote)

Expect the spreadsheet program to be integrated with both previous iWork products and replace the built in graphing functions (th data entry fields in iWork now is basically a simplified spreadsheet) You would be able to enter in your data, choose the chart style, and then link to it from Keynote and Pages (think of something like the Media Library)

I just hope the database program has similarities to the way the Keynote slides are presented. Those are much easier for swapping 'master slides' (think 'master fields' for a database program) than the current Pages 'master pages' concept, which cannot be swapped easily from one template to another.

Numbers will be for organizing and displaying numbers. Hopefully with decent formula concepts thrown in. Expect the presentation to be somewhat different.
 
nosarious said:
Since Tiger, at least, a mini-mathmatica is in the utilities folder. It's called Grapher and is far more complicated than a lot of people need.
Click to expand...
I love to play in Grapher. For fun, graph this 2D equation: y = (cos x) / sin (x^2)

Numbers will be based off a spreadsheet program. There is no need for a mathmatica style program to be included with the iwork suite. A database and spreadsheet are far more important.
Click to expand...
Exactly. A spreadsheet is a must, since it's used for so many purposes.

I'm less confident that the average user would use a database program as much as the other suite components. Ready-made databases like Address Book are critical, and would be too hard for Joe AverageUser to define from scratch, so a simple front-end or a large collection of templates would be important to help a database program get widespread use.
 
I just use the very basics of Excel. So if Apple had something similar that I could import the data, would change. I keep data for my wife's job. If Mail pans out in the future and my wife got away from Word, then could stop purchasing Office upgrades.
 
d.perel said:
What about the spreadsheet part of Appleworks? Doesn't that count for anything?
Click to expand...

iWork is supposed to replace Appleworks. AW is also very obsolete. It has been updated for over five years and still has the OS9 look to it.
 
iWork not replacing AppleWorks..., anytime soon.

BenRoethig said:
iWork is supposed to replace Appleworks. AW is also very obsolete. It has been updated for over five years and still has the OS9 look to it.
Click to expand...
Is it? That would seem so, and I tho't so myself. However, at MWSF '05, an Apple rep/employee told me that was not so. iWork was not being designed or marketed to compete with or replace AppleWorks. iWork was completely different, separate, and new. His point was that AppleWorks has its place in the market and iWork will have a different, separate, and new place in the market.

Logic dictates that eventually iWork will replace AppleWorks, yet so far, Apple has made no mention of that.
 
sacear said:
Is it? That would seem so, and I tho't so myself. However, at MWSF '05, an Apple rep/employee told me that was not so. iWork was not being designed or marketed to compete with or replace AppleWorks. iWork was completely different, separate, and new. His point was that AppleWorks has its place in the market and iWork will have a different, separate, and new place in the market.

Logic dictates that eventually iWork will replace AppleWorks, yet so far, Apple has made no mention of that.
Click to expand...
I imagine they can't say it's the successor to AppleWorks until it has at least the spreadsheet component, even if that's been the plan all along. We'll see.
 
d.perel said:
What about the spreadsheet part of Appleworks? Doesn't that count for anything?
Click to expand...

Barely. The problem with the AppleWorks spreadsheet is that it is very poor for doing some basic things like data entry. I can do data entry into Excel far faster than I can into AppleWorks and I have decades of experience with both. I dearly wish AppleWorks was up to the job, but it isn't. If I have to enter a lot of data, I sigh, and fire up Excel. 🙁
 
Detlev said:
I know nothing of this high tech math. What is supposed to happen?
Click to expand...
The equation is quite unusual-looking when graphed. It takes many sharp turns, going down, then up, then down again.
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
Good... a spreadsheet app would do iWork good.

Throw in a database, too, and we have ourselves an Office killer... 😉
Click to expand...

I think it will be an office killer with out a database. Standard office does not have Access, only the Pro suite does. Now a Publisher equivalent would be nice.
 
iWork '06 - Keynote 3, Pages 2, & Numbers ?

I got the first version of Keynote and loved it. Keynote 2 was a modest step up, but an appreciable one. Pages was depressing. Pages 2 has a lot of room to make up. If Numbers is real, I hope they didn't spend too much time working on it while ignoring Pages. Still, the weakest part of Keynote is the graphing. I understand what they did by including it, but really it is well below the standards set by the other features. A spreadsheet program with really tight integration with Keynote (and probably Pages) would relieve the pressure of trying to improve on the integrated graphing solution. Hopefully the Grapher program was a first attempt at working the bugs out of Numbers before its official release. If Numbers can do not only pointwise graphing like Excel but also function graphing like Grapher or Mathematica, then it would be a really impressive product.
 
Leaving Msft was easy

wdlove said:
I just use the very basics of Excel. So if Apple had something similar that I could import the data, would change. I keep data for my wife's job. If Mail pans out in the future and my wife got away from Word, then could stop purchasing Office upgrades.
Click to expand...

It's very easy to leave Word behind.

Unless you need really really fancy formatting.

I'm also very happy with Mail2. For customer relations contacts Daylite is the go.

For personal contact management, I find Address Book excellent.
 
Benyamin said:
I think it will be an office killer with out a database. Standard office does not have Access, only the Pro suite does. Now a Publisher equivalent would be nice.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I thought Pages was more of a Publisher equivalent than a Word equivalent. Maybe I should install that iWorks trial disc and take a look at Keynote and Pages.

Back on topic, what I use most in an office suite is the spreadsheet, so I'm all for Apple offering a modern one. The one in AppleWorks has some limitations. AppleWorks isn't all that bad, though. I wonder why they've neglected it for years?

I'm using NeoOffice/J, and it works pretty well.


Crikey
 
It would be brilliant...

...if Apple introduced a spreadsheet app to iWork. The lack of a Spreadsheet/database app is the only big hole in the current package and if Apple can apply the Mac magic to a spreadsheet app, spreadsheets will finally become fun(ish)!

I think the relase of "Numbers" would see many MS Office folders flying into the trash - about time too!
 
willwoodgate said:
...if Apple introduced a spreadsheet app to iWork. The lack of a Spreadsheet/database app is the only big hole in the current package and if Apple can apply the Mac magic to a spreadsheet app, spreadsheets will finally become fun(ish)!

I think the relase of "Numbers" would see many MS Office folders flying into the trash - about time too!
Click to expand...

It would be interesting to see how Apple implements this, and what angle they take. I would argue that Excel is the strongest of the apps in the Office suite, so for it to be comparable Apple would definitely have to roll up there sleeves and execute well on this app.
 
I've always liked Pages for making alternate resumes...I think it would be neat if they expanded on this.

Ideally, I would like to see it rival the power of Word but I have both for the time being.
 
Seasought said:
Ideally, I would like to see it rival the power of Word but I have both for the time being.
Click to expand...

I have my doubts whether it could comprehensively rival Word without turing into a more cumbersome, non-intuitive piece of bloatware itself -there are trade-offs. That being said, I am expecting some updates and new functionality from Apple in iWork '06, and I am looking forward to what Jobs unveils along these lines.
 
I really hope this is good

I reluctantly use Office 2004, but find it to be buggy and unintuitive. The are too many annoying things to list, but some examples are regularly losing the list of recently opened files, spreadsheets with pivot tables being prone to becoming corrupt, lack of 'repair' feature in the Mac version (compared to the windows version).

Office, particularly excel, is giving me too many headaches recently, while the rest of my system is running smoothly.

I would love for Apple to produce a viable alternative.

However, I don't for one minute think that they will for 2 reasons:

1) They are aiming for simple home use. The spreadsheet in AppleWorks was too basic for even my purposes (and I'm not a power user by any means) - but not being able to have multiple sheets within a workbook for example meant I couldn't import any of my Excel spreadsheets (I have 1 sheet per year for my personal finances).

2) Apple's track record in productivity apps hasn't been that great. I used to love MacWrite Pro, but when they scrapped it and brought out AppleWorks I gave it a try but had many problems. It was unstable, it had poor compatibility with MS documents (and the third party software for importing/exporting other formats was buggy), it wasn't updated often enough, and it cut out all the features I used to like about apps like MacWrite Pro.

If only apple would do 2 versions of it's productivity software, along the lines of Logic Pro and Logic Express, Final cut pro and iMovie etc then we would have the choice of the 'noddy' version or the 'power' version.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back