In 2009, Apple launched its iWork.com site in beta — and it’s been there ever since. That seems likely plenty of time for Apple to work out the kinks, so perhaps a finished version will be part of “iCloud” or “Castle” or whatever Apple’s rumored, upcoming cloud service will be dubbed.
iWork.com is designed as a service to share iWork documents online. Using your Apple ID, you click the iWork.com icon in the Keynote, Pages or Numbers toolbar to upload your document and invite others to view it online. Viewers can provide comments and notes, and download a copy of your document in iWork, Microsoft Office or PDF formats. A consolidated online list of all your shared documents indicates when your viewers have posted comments.
The service is still there, and still in beta. Let’s hope that one of these days it arrives in finished, polished form.
Let’s also hope that iCloud makes it a no-brainer to share documents among multiple Macs and iOS devices. For example, if I begin a product review in Pages on my iMac, it should be easy to sync it with multiple devices. That way I could continue working on the review on my MacBook or even my iPad.
Let’s hope these items on my wish list will be part of iCloud. Sure, there’ll be a music component and perhaps a video component. But with the ginormous data center Apple has built in North Carolina, let’s hope iCloud is more than a music/video “locker.”
We’ll probably learn more at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference that’s being held June 6-10. “At this year’s conference, we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” Apple said in a March press release.
In about a month we’ll hopefully see how iCloud/iWork.com fits into that future.
— Dennis Sellers