Jean-Louis Gassée, closing out a scathing piece on the new iWork:
I’ll leave comparing the even more crippled iCloud version of iWork to the genuinely functional Web version of Office 365 for another day and conclude.
First. Who knew and should have known about iWork’s bugs and undocumented idiosyncrasies? (I’ll add another: Beware the new autocorrect)
Second. Why brag instead of calmly making a case for the long game and telling loyal customers about the dents they will inevitably discover?
There’s been lots of noise over the last couple of weeks about the new version of iWork, and the fact that Apple stripped many features from the desktop applications in the name of inter-operability with iOS and iCloud.com.
Earlier this week, Apple announced that it will be adding several features back to iWork for Mac over the coming months. The article is an interesting one, but this particular paragraph is worrisome:
Apple:
There is no limit to the number of photos you can upload to My Photo Stream over time, but iCloud limits the number of photos that can be uploaded within a given hour, day, or month to prevent unintended or excessive use.
Update: This might not be so new after all.
I think this article highlights how confusing Photo Stream is, and why it’s probably best to view the service as a temporary conduit to move photos between devices, not as a long-term storage solution.
Apple:
Mail Update for Mavericks includes improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail, including the following:
- Fixes an issue that prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings
- Addresses an issue that may cause unread counts to be inaccurate
- Includes additional fixes that improve the compatibility and stability of Mail
Hopefully, our long national nightmare is over.
Apple:
The new iWork applications — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.
These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.
Apple:
We believe that our customers have a right to understand how their personal information is handled, and we consider it our responsibility to provide them with the best privacy protections available. Apple has prepared this report on the requests we receive from governments seeking information about individual users or devices in the interest of transparency for our customers around the world.
There’s some really interesting stuff in this PDF.
Elia Freedman:
The basics of educational buying are pretty straight forward. Will the technology provide an appropriate educational environment for students? Can schools control the devices as much or as little as they’d like? Is the cost within the budget of the grant or purchasing agent who will spend the money? (I say this oddly only because in many cases it is not the school or district purchasing but the purchase is made through a parent organization, grant or other funding body.) Is there training (professional development) for teachers? Is there education materials available for the technology?
Federico Viticci:
If you search for common terms like “web,” “SMS,” or “movies” in the iOS 7 App Store you’ll see special search results for Apple apps like Safari, Messages, and iTunes with a large icon, a description, and a link to learn more or open an app (such as Safari). These results appear on the App Store for iOS 7 devices (I wasn’t able to display them on a Mac using iTunes) and, in my tests, they also worked for queries like “browser,” “messages,” “cloud,” “internet,” “Siri,” and “text”. I’ve tried several other queries, but I couldn’t see results for other apps like Reminders, Calendars, Mail, Photos, Music, or Notes.
I’m excited to purchase one on Friday.
The Apple PR Machine:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013 fourth quarter ended September 28, 2013. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $37.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $7.5 billion, or $8.26 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $36 billion and net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 37 percent compared to 40 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
In honor of Bryan Cranston voicing the new iPad Air commercial, I made a little something for you guys.
Federico Viticci:
Coming from iOS 7, I feel a disconnect between my iPad and my MacBook that was less evident with Mountain Lion. Perhaps Apple just needs more time to get to a new kind of design and feature parity. Perhaps they have changed their mind about this (I don’t think so). I like some of the new things in Mavericks, and I profoundly dislike others. I look at my iPad with iOS 7, and I see a new OS with background downloads for all apps, 10 hours of battery life, and a cold aluminum back; my MacBook Air is better because of Mavericks, but it doesn’t make an impact on me. Like I said, I’m conflicted.