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Apple takes on Google and Microsoft with iWorks real-time collaboration
- sidcool 10y agoMore like catches up. No small achievement, but it was about time.
- avdempsey 10y agoIs realtime collaboration offered in any competing desktop apps? On the Mac at least there is none in Office.
- stuffedBelly 10y agoMS's OneNote has real-time collab capability.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Is realtime collaboration offered in any competing desktop apps? Office 2016 does have realtime collaboration in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, in both the desktop and online apps.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tkubacki 10y agoDesktop office is not real time - it's synced and since office web sucks compared to gDocs - gDocs win new markets.
- IMcD23 10y agoOffice 2016 has real-time collaboration on the Mac, and has for quite some time. Source: I work on Office for Mac at Microsoft.
- BFatts 10y agoIt's honestly a game of innovate or catch up. It's not like Apple is unique in this...
- sidcool 10y agoExactly! And yet they make that face like this is the first time anyone has thought about it. I know it's for the marketing and RDF, but still. Collaborative editing was solved by Google Wave.
- pmontra 10y agoDoes it work on the web even for the people that don't own anything Apple, maybe only an iTunes account? Because if it's not interoperable with non Apple devices and OSes it's going to stay small. Think of Google Docs working only on Android and Chromebooks.
- shadowfiend 10y agoAccording to the keynote, yes. I imagine we'll know more once it's released, the date for which hasn't actually been communicated.
- galad87 10y agoiWork on the web already had real-time collaboration, the Mac and iOS version didn't.
- oedenfield 10y agoEven then are there compelling features (I didn't see the keynote) that make the web-based service superior to others?
- baldfat 10y agoHow is this the first female presenter at an Apple Event? "On stage, Susan Prescott — Apple’s vice president of product management and the first female presenter at Apple’s event"
- jhugg 10y agoThe first today, not ever?
- kylec 10y agoShe's been onstage before
- helloworld 10y agoMaybe because 16 of the 19 top Apple executives are white men. (Women lead retail, HR, and public policy.) http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/ http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/ Aren't there sufficiently talented women -- and also people of Hispanic and Asian ancestry -- who could serve as leaders and role models at Apple?
- DasIch 10y agoWell, what do you propose? Firing the executives and replacing them with women just to boost diversity?
- helloworld 10y agoTim Cook has been the CEO of Apple for five years. Based on the executive team he has in place, it would appear that diversity hasn't been a priority for him.
- DasIch 10y agoNobody just replaces people on the executive team, they leave, retire or fuck up and are let go. Tim Cook himself has been on the executive team for a long time and a lot of the others also have been on the team for a long time. Improving diversity requires changes in hiring, promotion and culture. It will take time for the number of employees who are part of underrepresented minorities to rise and for them to rise in rank until they eventually become part of the generation that replaces the generation that currently fills the executive team. I'm a feminist, I like Apple and I want it to become a more diverse company because I think that's good for society and I think it would allow Apple to make better products and push the industry even more to innovate. I do think Apple is trying, I don't think they're doing quite as well as they could. It's perfectly fine and necessary to criticize, to push them but there is no magic button that Tim Cook can push and make everything instantly better. No matter how much you may want to, stopping decades of discrimination takes time and undoing the damage it caused takes longer still. It sucks and it's not fair but I understand that people are angry about it but it's not fair to blame Tim Cook for it. And quite frankly, if you believe that a gay man from Alabama doesn't care about discrimination and wouldn't push that magic button if it existed, I'm not sure there is anyone capable of satisfying your expectations.
- joezydeco 10y agoMy kid's elementary school has recently shelved the iPads in favor of Chromebooks. Usable keyboard, multiple logins, gDocs collaboration, low replacement cost, etc etc etc. The fact that the iWorks collaboration was highlighted in an education talk tells me a lot.
- robterrell 10y agoMy kids' middle school just moved to iPads from Chromebooks, which I thought was weird. (The elementary school had some iPads, so my kids felt like they were moving up to adult-ish laptops when they moved to middle school.) The iPads had iWorks pre-installed, so I imagine they'll be using this feature.
- cududa 10y agoiPads for education support multiuser login
- joezydeco 10y agoAs of iOS 9.3 (March 2016). Too little too late. Our switch to chromebooks took place last year and the planning probably started a year or so before that. I also don't see where iOS' "Shared iPad" feature lets you log in to any iPad anywhere like a Google Apps account would.
- tedmiston 10y agoSystem-wide maybe it's late, but many education apps already had multi-user login support baked in. I guess it depends how you use the iPads.
- comex 10y ago> I also don't see where iOS' "Shared iPad" feature lets you log in to any iPad anywhere like a Google Apps account would. You can certainly log into any iPad in the school. Regarding other devices, AFAICT you log into Shared iPad with a 'Managed Apple ID', which you could probably also log into on icloud.com or use natively from personal Apple devices you have, though since macOS and iOS currently only support one iCloud account configured at a time (per user account in the former case) the utility would be limited, as you'd probably also have a personal Apple ID.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoThis should have been introduced to the iWorks suite a long time ago. They've lost whatever lead they had by ignoring iWorks for the past decade or more.
- BFatts 10y agoOf course. And if they come out with another new feature I'm sure you'll point out how it should have been in version 1. But getting v1.0 out the door is tough - trying to add every feature will just delay it indefinitely.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoVersion 1 came out a decade ago. They've had 10 years to get to version 2. Collaborative editing is so old hat by now it's not even a thing anymore.
- ktRolster 10y agoIt should be emphasized that they've ignored iWorks for a long time.....it's hard to trust that it won't regress again after the renewed emphasis. If they had spent the last decade making iWorks a replacement for Office (making it handle Excel, for example), they would be in a really good place right now. Instead, it's hard to take them seriously.
- lallysingh 10y agoOf course they will. iWorks isn't in their primary wheelhouse, so it'll have an on-again off-again lifecycle.
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y agoYou're being silly. They have spent the past decade making iWorks better, and in fact, the whole app was revamped from the ground up about 2 years ago, to bring perfect compatibility across platforms from mac to ios. It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving. Google's only run in the browser, and poorly compared to Apple's browser choice, and Microsofts is expensive, buggy and while it has immense numbers of features it has terrible UI.
- gumby 10y agoI don't really understand the point of iWork. I did back when Apple was worried that MS would not maintain Office on the Mac, and when Office didn't run on iOS. But since those cases aren't true, it's a lot of engineering expenditure for a feature that will not cause someone to buy a Mac, iPhone or iPad. Even now they are still toys even less capable than the clumsy google docs apps. Any ideas as to why this is worth Apple's time? (This isn't an anti-Apple rant: I am a heavy user of their hardware).
- splatcollision 10y agoNumbers, for example, is surprisingly capable & way nicer to use than Excel or Google Docs for a home user.
- gumby 10y agoI tried to go iWork only for a while and numbers barely made it for me. It had too small a level of functionality and in exchange was more complicated than it needed to be to get a small amount out. I found Soulver (a re-imagining of the calculator interface) was both simpler and more powerful for straightforward calculations -- by the time it tops out, Numbers has probably topped out. But the home point is a good one: Numbers was great for making up a weekly chores sheet for the kid, easily decorated with fun photos and such. Still: does that justify Apple's investment?
- landr0id 10y agoI tried to use Numbers for some biology work when I was in school and found it frustratingly difficult to use. I'd type something in to a cell, it'd autocomplete, I'd cancel the autocompletion, but it still did not give me full control over the cell. There were other things that were frustrating and just flat out didn't make sense, like the way it would fill data automatically.
- pattisapu 10y agoNative feel, reliability, and responsiveness make the iWork apps pleasant to use, if you don't need the full feature set of what MS Office apps offer (e.g., making a "Table of Authorities" in a legal brief). Sometimes one can make better looking documents too.
- jesseendahl 10y agoIt's kind of crazy to me that TechCrunch misspelled the product name in both the headline and body of the story and no one has noticed. It's iWork (singular), not iWorks: http://www.apple.com/iwork/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/ Edit: Looks like they fixed it.
- nashashmi 10y agoMicrosoft's implementation of collaborative work is completely moot for the at home user.
- gchokov 10y agoIt's about time. Office 365 collaboration just sucks!
- based2 10y agoalt: oss collaborative online tools: https://framalab.org/ https://framalab.org/