10 ms·
iWork for iCloud beta
- ryanglasgow 13y agoSaaS is outside of Apple's expertise so it'll be interesting to see how this goes. I've tested the beta and it's very impressive, but where Apple has trouble is scaling its internet services.
- mortenjorck 13y agoIt's amazing how much Google has upended not only the market for, but our expectations of "Office" suite products. When I first clicked the "share" button in Pages, I was actually expecting an "invite a collaborator" option and was disappointed until I stopped to remember what a massive infrastructural achievement Google's real-time document collaboration system is. I'm sure such functionality will eventually come to iWork, and it's undoubtedly very impressive already, but it's a reminder of just how wide Google's lead is at present.
- derefr 13y agoThis service doesn't really seem like it needs anything in particular to scale; it's just a static asset-load of Javascript. All the "magic" is done by talking to the same iCloud backend that the installable version of iWork does, which was already scaled to the point where this would just be a blip.
- ryanglasgow 13y agoI'm referring to file storage and syncing across devices. It's not particularly easy given that Dropbox is an entire company devoted to this cause.
- tuananh 13y agoNo screenshot of iWork on Chrome. Only IE and Safari : )
- maguay 13y agoGoogle's the main enemy for Apple these days, far more than the folks up in Redmond I'd say.
- nthnclrk 13y agoThat actually makes sense. As on the OS X side of things Apple are only going to promote their own browser, and on the Windows side of things, they need to convey that it works on a PC (which a lot of people will interpret from seeing IE). Showing Chrome doesn't say to mum and dad PC owners that iWork will work on their machine.
- jmduke 13y agoI used to complain about iWork all the time, but now that I'm a complete cog in Apple's diabolical machine (MBA, iPad, iPhone), I've realized two things: 1. Office for Mac is terrible relative to Office for Windows, to the extent that I get actively frustrated when I try and use it (which I sorta suspect was a design goal.) 2. Google Docs hasn't particularly improved since I started using it. Seeing as I've more or less given up trying to do heavy Excel work, I need to basically do pretty markup, pretty data, and pretty presentations for non-technical clients. Being able to display it easily on the iPad would be wonderful.
- bla2 13y agoHuh, when did you start using Google Docs?
- RealCasually 13y agoWhat problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.
- aroman 13y agoI for one find the interface positively infuriating. I don't have it installed any more, but when I was using Office 2011 for Mac I found that its integration into the OS, from copy/paste to basic UI principles, was horrible. It felt, frankly, as bad as using OpenOffice -- software which is designed to run mostly as-in on Linux, OS X, and Windows.
- derefr 13y agoIt sounds like Office for Mac is just like iTunes for Windows, then.
- aroman 13y agoPrecisely :) Or, depending on who you ask[0], precisely the opposite. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwxnWuG_Ruw#t=65s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwx...
- MaxGabriel 13y agoAwhile ago Bret Victor tweeted: "Human race shoots self in foot, builds prosthetic replacement, completes 100-meter dash. Introducing iWork For iCloud." Can anyone explain what he meant?
- aroman 13y agoMy understanding of that tweet would be that he is echoing the general sentiment that many technologists share that the web has made people excited about technologies that were better written half a decade ago. For example, all the hullabaloo about creating basic sprite-based games or simple WebGL models. Such stuff has been possible on the desktop for many years, but suddenly because it's in a browser everyone seems to lose their mind over the technical amazement of such developments. To relate this back to the tweet, I believe Bret was saying that Apple is touting iWork for iCloud as a revolutionary product, when in fact it is a pared-down and buggier version of software which has existed on our desktops for years. It's sort of like breaking the wheel to reinvent it.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoAnd everyone that can only invision this can piss off. Yeah, they're excited about a spinning 3d cube on an electronic screen. Surely they're not excited about a ubiquitous, open platform that doesn't require lockin and selling our souls, nor does it require to write n+1 fucking mobile apps.
- falk 13y agoiCloud.com sucks. They're trying to replicate iOS UI and functionality in the browser and it's an abysmal failure. Steve Jobs always liked to tout Apple and their employees as artists. Well artists have to know their medium and that's something Apple really needs to work on. Edit: What's with all the down votes? This is valid criticism.
- prawn 13y agoMight be because the discussion is about iWork specifically, and you haven't really explained why iCloud is an abysmal failure.
- falk 13y agoiWork for iCloud which is a part of iCloud.com. I'm strictly speaking of the website for iCloud. It's awful. It takes a long time to load and is stuck with a clunky user-interface that mimics iOS/OS X. It doesn't look right and it doesn't feel right. Apple needs to hire people who know how to design a web application.
- prawn 13y agoMaybe there is a topic on a forum somewhere about the iCloud website specifically where your comment might be better received?
- falk 13y agoPerhaps, but this is just something I said in passing by the thread, so I shouldn't have to seek out another forum. If people want to down vote me because they can't accept that Apple isn't perfect then I reckon that's their prerogative. I own and use Apple products exclusively and I think it's important to point out their flaws. Google has much better web applications.
- brianwillis 13y agoI've played with the beta, and it's pretty neat being able to have what almost feels like a desktop quality experience in a browser. It does have a bit of an iOS 6 feel to it with gradients and drop shadows, which is surprising.
- footpath 13y agoI suppose we shouldn't expect Firefox compatibility anytime soon? The iCloud calendar icon's been broken on Firefox for a while now: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5182304 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5182304
- moqups 13y agoIt's probably because Firefox does not support many presentation attributes as well as proper font antialiasing for the text and tspan SVG tags. It looks like they did create their own text layout engine with support for flowing around arbitrary shapes. I'm curious how well this works, since emulating native text capabilities (just think RTL vs LTR) requires an insane amount of Javascript and the performance is pretty terrible for texts longer than a few hundred words. If they got this right, it must be a masterpiece of Javascript code. Google recently introduced their own text layout capabilities in Google Docs (also SVG based) and it's pretty buggy beyond simple text. Just to highlight the complexity of the issue, they used to render text into SVG on the server until recently. It's one of the reasons we had to use foreignObject with pure HTML inside for Moqups instead, although it prevents us from supporting IE at all, including IE 11. We can at least target Webkit/Blink & Gecko this way. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-shapes-1-20130620/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-shapes-1-20130620/
- volaski 13y agoI would use "XCode for iCloud".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- peterkelly 13y agoSo here's something I don't get: They've done Pages in the browser. Ok, great. So that would use HTML5, right? And take advantage of modern web browsers' layout compatibilities, complete with CSS styling, and all the cool new stuff like CSS regions & shapes. Right? Apparently not. If you go into Pages and open up web inspector, what you'll see is not a nice clean HTML structure with the text written in HTML and formatting in CSS. Instead, you'll see a large collection of dynamically-generated SVG <text> elements, with pixel-exact positions explicitly specified, even to the level of the horizontal locations of individual glyphs. This effectively completely bypasses the browser's own layout capabilities. They appear to have written their own layout engine in javascript, or perhaps ported over the existing native Pages one. Any ideas why they would have taken this route? Apple and Adobe have both been doing some fantastic work on improving WebKit with better layout facilities, and Microsoft have been doing the same with IE. Things are pretty good in 2013. Why not leverage that work?
- michael_miller 13y agoMy guess is that it's because browser support is inconsistent, and Apple needs to have a 100% flawless experience on ahem less-well-engineered browsers. Positioning the SVG elements precisely ensures that nothing is cut off, and there aren't any visual oddities. Writing your own layout engine is a great way to ensure a consistent experience across multiple rendering engines.
- cloudwalking 13y agoMost of Apple's other online services (particularly all of their dev tools) instead just require Safari.
- awy 13y ago`contenteditable` has a lot of issues once you go past casual text editing. Sounds like it's doing something similar to Google Docs (using the browser simply as a dumb renderer, and doing a lot of the calculations/layout in JavaScript).
- eyesee 13y ago
- rogerchucker 13y agoI saw these appear a month ago and then they disappeared from iCloud.com for me. Am I the only one?
- crazygringo 13y agoI tried them a month ago, they're still in my account.
- rogerchucker 13y agoBeautiful - Keynote for iCloud crashed my Safari on 10.8.4...
- tar 13y agoNo Firefox compatibility?
- adamconroy 13y agoiM an iDiot