iWork Updates for MacOS, iOS, and the Web ⇥ tidbits.com

Michael E. Cohen, TidBits:

As with previous iWork updates, all the apps received some nearly identical new capabilities, while simultaneously acquiring individual refinements. Also, like the previous updates, the Mac apps gained the fullest set of new features, the iOS apps got a generous subset of those, and the iCloud apps were limited to a handful while still retaining compatibility with their more sophisticated siblings.

[…]

For example, though you can’t add or even view bookmarks in Pages for iCloud, any bookmarks you have added on, say, the Mac, are not harmed by editing the document in your browser (unless, of course, you delete the text that was bookmarked). Similarly, you can see existing leader lines for pie charts in the browser apps, even though you can’t create or edit them there.

All the browser apps have had a user-interface facelift, and their toolbars are now color-coded to match the iOS color palettes for the iOS apps: orange for Pages, green for Numbers, and blue for Keynote. More interestingly, the toolbar of each browser app now has a button that you can click to open the current document in its native app on the Mac. This feature, however, is only half-implemented, because doing so does not close the document in the browser, which means you’ll see conflict warnings if you make changes with the Mac app without manually closing the document in the browser app first.

I’m impressed that Apple continues to deliver simultaneous updates across three apps on three very different platforms, but I worry that each is not as good as it could be because of it. The second and third paragraphs in the quote I selected are indicative of ways in which the browser version isn’t fully baked.

Meanwhile, the Mac version of Pages still lacks features that were present in “old” Pages. It may have gained LaTeX support, but it’s still missing some contextual menu options that are available in other Mac apps, and I find basic text editing bugs every time I use it. I’m not sure how much of this, if any, is tied to components shared between the three platforms each app is available on, but I didn’t notice the same kinds of bugs when the Mac and iOS versions were more-or-less discrete apps.