Apple Makes iWork Web Beta Available Free For Anyone With An Apple ID

Apple has taken another step toward turning iWork into a service anyone can take advantage of, similar to Google’s web-based productivity suite. The company made its iWork for iCloud apps available to anyone, regardless of whether or not they have any Apple hardware, so long as they have or sign up for an Apple ID. So far, that’s only available via the public iCloud Beta, but presumably if all goes well with the test that will roll out to the standard version of iCloud after that.

The web-based versions of Apple’s iWork suite are surprisingly complete, and also manage to keep getting better, thanks to updates that have brought features like interactive charts and a much better user interface to the platform since its introduction back in 2013.

iWork used to be a paid productivity suite that Apple sold first via boxed copies then via the Mac App Store. Today, it completes the transition from revenue source to value-add service for iWork, with a web version that serves as a taste of Apple’s ecosystem offerings even for the uninitiated. The fact is that iWork for Apple is something to dangle at potential customers, which gives it an advantage over Microsoft, which still has to derive revenue somehow from Office, despite a gradual decrease in cost to access for Redmond’s productivity software.

Apple generally enjoys a halo effect resulting from people using their lower cost entry-level devices and investing in other parts of their product line. iWork presents a new opportunity to bring in new customers and take advantage of that halo effect, and it’ll be interesting to see just how far Apple goes in terms of offering iCloud services independent of hardware.

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog