iWork Apps for the iPad can hurt your documents
Posted by Mauricio Longo in Apps on Apr 6th, 2010 | 0 comments
It seems that the users of Mac version of iWork were in for a nasty surprise with iWork for the iPad. The applications while generally considered quite powerful by reviewers do not support the full range of features available in their desktop siblings. The result? Documents that are edited in the iPad and synched back to the Mac loose some of their original formatting, angering users.
I can understand how someone would be angered by loosing the result of hours of work in formatting a long document or presentation and I can also understand how this wasn’t picked up sooner in reviews. Most reviewers don’t really use iWork except when it is time to review a new version of it. Let’s face it, Apple’s productivity apps for the Mac while extremely attractive in their design aren’t as full featured as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org and its variations for OS X such as NeoOffice. This means that most reviewers which are Mac users don’t use iWork on their day to day activities.
Considering this scenario, it’s no wonder it was a few days before it was picked up as chatter in the Apple support forums. The really unfortunate side of things is that many people could have avoided some grief if Apple had been clear about the differences between the two versions of the applications on its website and on the App Store. To add insult to injury the group that got hit by this compatibility issue was exactly that of those most deeply wedded to Apple’s products.
While I’ve been a Mac user for a couple of years, I’ve always sticked to OpenOffice.org when I work with documents on the MacBook, as that is what I use on Windows as well. This means that I would probably be quite happy using iWork for the iPad to create short documents as I would never really be affected by this issue. Looking at it from another angle, I had been wondering if I should switch to iWork on the Mac, now that I’m going to be using iWork on the iPad. It would seem that the answer to that is going to be no, at least for a while.
*Image: Apple Inc.
