Apple Sending iWork for iCloud Beta Invites to Non-Developers

[BJMRamage]

I never got an invitation...unless it went to Junk Mail

Anyway, last night, I log in on my home Mac and see the three Beta icons. I can open and use Pages.
I can also see them today on my work machine. pretty cool.

probably wont be using them too much and wonder if they'll be free once Mavericks goes Live or if this Beta is free but to use later will need to pay.

and maybe need to buy the mobile versions?

I guess this is like a Google Docs thing

 

[DotCom2]

I received my invite today and it says all I have to do is log into my icloud account. I do that, and it shows the iWork icon but when I click on that all it says is coming soon! WTH?

 

[FoxyKaye]

Just logged in with my invitation this AM and played with it - I've been doing things like email and documents in the Google ecosystem since the days of my Nexus One, but I have to say that Pages knocks the socks off of Google Docs. Like others have mentioned, it would be great if there were collaborative editing in Pages, and I'd even add, future integration between Dropbox and iCloud (and yes, I know that might be counterproductive to Apple, but still unbelievably cool).

 

[jasondkiesling]

I've been on the beta test for some number of weeks now. It works well enough but I never find a real use for it. What's the point if you have a Mac you can run iWork native on the Mac. This is great if you are on a PC, or were seriously broke and could not afford Pages and Numbers. But if you own a Mac I don't see the point.

One serious flaw is that all the Mac features are not supported so if you open a Mac iWork document in the on-line version you get asked if you want to make a copy with the format features removed. You click "yes" and go. But now how to save your edits back to the "real" document? For this to work all version must be 100% identical.

The on-line version can't have every font you own on the Mac either. So if you open a document using the online editor and it uses some font that is not on-line it should offer a kind of substitution

The point of it is so that you have access to it everywhere you are. It is a competitor to Google Docs. The point is to have it sync everywhere. I could have gotten it before and paid $10 each ($30 for all 3) but I didn't want to spend that much on it, when I could use FREE Google Docs, or already owned Microsoft Office.

There are bugs in it, but it is definitely a great new feature that I have now used several times since I have gotten the beta access.

Apple is just trying to get their stand in the market that Google has pretty much taken over without competition.