It didn’t take long for OS X Mountain Lion to hit the top of the Mac App Store’s paid chart following its release yesterday, which means Apple shifted a heck of a lot of copies on day one. In fact, it sold so many copies that traffic from the Cupertino company’s servers was up to six times higher than normal.
Apple has updated its iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) with Retina graphics for the new MacBook Pro and iCloud documents for OS X Mountain Lion. Documents in the Cloud allows you to access and manage synced documents across the iOS and OS X versions of the iWork apps. The functionality is baked into TextEdit and Preview in Mountain Lion, and Apple lets developers build iCloud document support into third-party apps as well.
Another Mountain Lion feature, Dictation, is also available when using the iWork suite. Like Siri on iOS, you can speak into your Mac’s mic and have your voice transcribed automatically.
The new versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers don’t appear to be live in the Mac App Store yet, but we’ll update this post when they are available. [Update: They're out!] Sadly, iWork hasn’t received a major upgrade since 2009.
Apple has issued iWork.com users with a final reminder to warn them that the service will be closed down on July 31. The company states that as of this date, “you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com public beta site or view them on the web.”
Jumsoft’s first collection of Word templates give a stunning designer look to any business or personal documents.
Jumsoft has announced its first pack of Word for Mac templates. Named the Inspiration Set for Word, the pack contains 169 templates for almost any document or project from business stationary to canning jar labels – of them beautifully designed by Jumsoft’s team of professional graphic designers.
Jumsoft has made a name for itself with a range of template collections for iWork and other Apple apps including a collection of templates/themes for iBooks Author and two collections for spicing up emails composed using OS X’s Mail app. The company has also produced two packs of clipart that can be used in virtually application.
Apple’s iWork suite hasn’t been updated since January 2009. To put that in perspective, when the last major version of iWork came out, OS X Leopard was still the most recent version of Apple’s operating system, and Snow Leopard was still eight months away from being announced: OS X Lion and Mountain Lion weren’t even glimmers on the horizon then. The most current iPhone was the iPhone 3G, and the iPad was still a year from being released.
It’s obvious, then, that the iWork suite is way past due for an update. It’s possible, though, that we could see iWork ’12 hit as soon as the end of July, dropping alongside OS X Mountain Lion.
In the last couple of days, Apple killed off MobileMe and is now warning users its killing off another cloud service: the iWork.com Beta, a service Apple launched in 2009 to allow for online editing, downloading and collaborating on documents.
Google shook up the mobile business landscape by announcing its acquisition of mobile office powerhouse Quickoffice. That move might not seem terribly large, but it creates a very different and unexpected dynamic in the business mobility world. It also sets up a showdown over business capabilities that could have lasting ramifications.
Why is this move significant? It means that every company that produces a major mobile platform now also owns a serious office and productivity solution. Microsoft has Office, Apple has iWork, RIM has Documents To Go (which it acquired nearly two years ago), and Google now has Quickoffice as well as Google Docs. Each company can now ensure that its mobile business customers will have at least one solid option for working with Office files on their smartphones or tablets.
One of the standout features of Apple’s iWork suite is how easy it is to make really standout documents and presentations. Compared to the basic and often drab files that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint produce, iWork-created files look bright, polished, and offer a sense of personality and style. While Office for Mac comes with a set of templates and design functions, they seem bland next to iWork and they aren’t anywhere near as easy to use.
Only Microsoft has the ability to make its tools less clunky and more intuitive, but other companies can spice things up with additional themes and templates. This week Theme Inn took up that challenge and succeeded rather spectacularly.
Recosoft announced today the latest version of its PDF2Office Professional tool. The software, which allows users to convert PDF files into Microsoft Office documents while maintaining the layout and formatting or the original non-editable file.
PDF2Office Professional is one of several file conversion tools that the company offers. The lineup also includes tools for converting PDF files into iWork documents or Adobe In Design files as well as a tool for converting In Design projects into Office documents.
Want to download a trial version of Apple’s iWork apps? Tough. Apple just pulled them, replacing the page on its site with a notice sending you over to the
Translation: Everything – and we mean everything, will be going through the App Store from now on.
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