Apple introduces: iWork applications for the iPad
In a somewhat surprising move — at least a move that most analysts weren’t really predicting — Apple also introduced an iPhone OS-compatible version of iWork today. Some sites are claiming that iWork ’10 has been released and that’s what we’re seeing on the iPad. We’re not so sure.
An iPhone OS-specific version of iWork was bound to happen at some point, and you can easily tell that Apple put a lot of thought into this to make it awesome. It was honestly the most impressive part of the keynote today, at least in our opinions. The high level of productivity this application will allow an iPad user is incredible. If you get a word document emailed to you, you can open it and edit it right away… if you get a spreadsheet, no problem… in Steve’s case: if you receive your Keynote presentation from your assistant, you can review, edit and present — all using the iPad. Hot. Let’s break it down:
Keynote — the biggest change here is that you get to use Keynote with multitouch technology. Drag slides to change their order, move items around the screen with your finger, even pinch-to-resize pictures and other objects.
Numbers — besides being a spreadsheet app (snooze) it has an adaptive calculator and is visually pleasing. I don’t work much with spreadsheets, but I’d love to give this app a spin just because of the demo in the keynote today. Granted, spreadsheets are typically a lot of numbers and the iPad’s on-screen keyboard is the typist’s best friend… but it’s still great for mobile document editing.
Pages — all of these apps have been in development for several years now, but this one has always been my least favorite. I love Keynote, Numbers I rarely use and Pages I hated for its compatibility issues. In the first revision, I would save documents as Microsoft Word “.doc” so that I could email them to PC users, but the format would be consistently wrong. I could never get the exported Word document to look like my Pages document. I’m told that this has been fixed for the most part, so with the addition of Pages to the iPad, I may have to give it another shot. You can expect wonderful scrolling and document navigation, but the typing experience is going to be a challenge. May we suggest picking up one of Apple’s 1,000 new accessories, the iPad Keyboard? We don’t think the iPad has enough dongles.
All in all, it’s still my favorite feature to the iPad at the moment. I’m not a productivity geek, but this stuff just seems well-designed and very user friendly (besides the keyboard thing).


