

iWork for iCloud beta - erickhill
https://www.apple.com/iwork-for-icloud/

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jmduke
I 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.

~~~
RealCasually
What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.

~~~
aroman
I 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
It sounds like Office for Mac is just like iTunes for Windows, then.

~~~
aroman
Precisely :)

Or, depending on who you ask[0], precisely the opposite.

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwx...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwxnWuG_Ruw#t=65s)

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peterkelly
So 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
My 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
Most of Apple's other online services (particularly all of their dev tools)
instead just require Safari.

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ryanglasgow
SaaS 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.

~~~
derefr
This 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
I'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.

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MaxGabriel
Awhile 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
My 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.

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brianwillis
I'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.

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volaski
I would use "XCode for iCloud".

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k-mcgrady
What advantages would that give you over using Xcode on a MacBook?

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volaski
I could develop anywhere. On a windows machine, on a friend's laptop, even on
my iPad I guess (hopefully)

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footpath
I 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
It'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/)

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tuananh
No screenshot of iWork on Chrome. Only IE and Safari : )

~~~
maguay
Google's the main enemy for Apple these days, far more than the folks up in
Redmond I'd say.

~~~
melling
What is everyone talking about? The Chrome logo is there and so is this:

"iWork for iCloud works with Safari 6.0.3 or later, Chrome 27.0.1 or later,
and Internet Explorer 9.0.8 or later. "

~~~
tuananh
I know it's there. It's just that they dont take screenshots of iWork on
Chrome.

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tar
No Firefox compatibility?

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adamconroy
iM an iDiot

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rogerchucker
Beautiful - Keynote for iCloud crashed my Safari on 10.8.4...

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rogerchucker
I saw these appear a month ago and then they disappeared from iCloud.com for
me. Am I the only one?

~~~
crazygringo
I tried them a month ago, they're still in my account.

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falk
iCloud.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
Might be because the discussion is about iWork specifically, and you haven't
really explained why iCloud is an abysmal failure.

~~~
falk
iWork 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
Maybe there is a topic on a forum somewhere about the iCloud website
specifically where your comment might be better received?

~~~
falk
Perhaps, 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.

