Sunday, October 19, 2014

New iWork File Formats

The new versions of the iWork apps change the file formats again, but it’s not as drastic a change as last year. Numbers 3.2.2 created a package folder with some metadata and a ZIP archive containing the .iwa files. Numbers 3.5 seems to use the same structure except that the .numbers file itself is the ZIP archive.

I repeated my CSV file import test from last year, and I don’t see any speed or size changes between the two versions of Numbers.

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Also, see File > Advanced > Change File Type > (Package | Single File)*

* might not be the exact menu names, I'm translating them back from French.

@Michel You have it right. Thanks.

I'm assuming these are the same as the .numbers.zip file that iWork 13 would generate for sending to iOS, but I haven't investigated.

What's got me curious is that mdls seems to report the appropriate UTI for the .numbers file, depending on whether it's a package of a single file. It's been a while since I've done file UTI development, but I thought the system based the UTI on the extension. In this case, I was getting the ZIP hierarchy UTI for a new file and one of my colleagues was getting the packages hierarchy UTI for a legacy file we had around. We both had Yosemite and the new iWork installed.

Of course, that was late Friday afternoon speculation, so it's entirely possible we'd just checked out for the weekend by that point.

@Eric Yes, I’m getting “com.apple.iwork.numbers.numbers” from old Numbers files and “com.apple.iwork.numbers.sffnumbers” from new ones. That was my understanding of UTIs as well. I wonder if Apple has enhanced the system to also look at the declared UTTypeConformsTo if there are multiple types with the same extension.

[…] available for Mavericks users, iWork files created on Yosemite are backwards incompatible. There is a setting to change […]

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