Monday, October 19, 2015

Big iWork Update

Juli Clover:

There are also new Force Touch gestures in each of the apps, which work with the new Force Touch Magic Trackpad and the trackpad in the Retina MacBook Pro and the 12-inch MacBook. In all three of the apps, a Force click on an image will allow them to be edited, and this Force gesture has built-in haptic feedback.

Keynote and Pages have gained support for opening presentations and documents from 2006 and 2008 versions of the software, while Numbers is now able to open Numbers ’08 spreadsheets.

Zac Hall has a list of the features and other changes. Apple has an even more extensive list, although I don’t expect the URL to last long.

David Sparks:

Some of these updates are simple fixes for new features in the hardware and operating systems, like the ability to use split screen mode on the Mac or 3-D Touch on the new iPhone, but other bits show continuing development. For instance, Pages for the Mac got some improved AppleScript tools and added several new Apple designed templates.

John Gruber:

Pages for Mac is thus once again as OpenType-capable as Pages ’08 was. Or, you know, TextEdit.

Nick Heer:

It remains impossible to add mirrored page numbers, though.

I wonder whether anyone is keeping track of where the apps are relative to the ’09 versions. Are all the missing features back? If not, it might be best to keep the old versions of the apps installed, despite the improved support for the old file formats.

Update (2015-10-20): Bill Cheeseman notes via e-mail that the Bookmarks feature for making internal links within a document isn’t back yet. If I open a document with bookmarks in Pages 5.6, it presents a Warnings window that says “This Pages document may look different.”

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

Images inserted in footers and headers are still missing.

Correct that: images inserted in footers and headers are missing when importing from Pages '09 document and text warp is set to automatic. Seems that images in footers and headers can only be inline in the new Pages. And they get tossed away without warning when importing from an old format if they are not. I guess that's still progress.

"Are all the missing features back?"

They will never be all back considering "The usable User Interface" feature is gone forever and productivity followed it into oblivion.

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