iWork.com has been much maligned and mostly shunned since its launch last year, but despite its flaws, this free online service has a lot to offer.
Let’s say that you’re asked to name Apple’s least-impressive software over the past 10 years. After considering the anaemic .Mac Backup application or pondering the disappointment of the Mac OS X version of AppleWorks, most people would be hard pushed to find anything as unloved as iWork.com.
iWork.com – and you probably need reminding of this – is the little-used collaboration service for iWork applications announced by Apple back in January 2009. It’s been languishing in beta for the past 15 months, with little sign of a full release.
I’ll admit that there are good reasons for most Mac users shunning it. When you compare it with its most successful collaborative working rival, Google Docs, it has a list of drawbacks.
With Google Docs, for example, you can invite people to share any document hosted there, or create a public URL so that anyone can view and even optionally edit your document. Those people with whom you share a document can genuinely collaborate on it, adding and amending as they see fit. Unlike iWork.com, Google Docs supports versioning, so you can revert to previous versions at any time. Compared with that, iWork looks insipid. Yes, it supports comments and lets viewers add notes to shared documents, but those with whom you share can’t actually edit the file itself.
So why, despite all its flaws, am I finding myself using iWork.com more? I’ve found myself giving the same 10 reasons to defend iWork.com’s limitations against its detractors.
1. It’s the easiest way to collaborate
If you’re working on a document in any of the iWork apps and decide you’d like to get some opinions on it, doing so is simply a matter of clicking the ‘Share on iWork.com’ button in any Pages, Numbers or Keynote document, and choosing who to share it with. The document is transferred online within seconds, and you have control over who sees it and what they can do with it. You can continue to work on the original document offline and offer updates for comment when you need to.
2. It provides accurate previews
Unlike Google documents, those reviewing the document get a pixel-perfect view of how it’s going to appear. This is most important when it comes to fonts. Google Docs documents are limited to using fewer than a dozen of the most common web fonts. But iWork.com will happily render any font in a shared document, even if they don’t have that installed locally. The only minor exception I’ve found is Keynote presentations. When hosted on iWork.com, these don’t display transitions or allow embedded videos to be played.
3. Its restrictions can be beneficial
What creative person wants others to tweak their document? The downside of any collaborative environment that allows users to make changes is that confusion can reign. iWork lets others comment or make notes about your document, but you remain in control at all times. You can adopt any suggested changes in your local iWork document and when you upload it again, it will replace the original. The local document keeps track of who you shared it with, so by default they’ll be notified you’ve uploaded a new version to the iWork.com site. Any notes made on the older document are kept – although older comments are removed.
4. Free access
Contrary to popular wisdom, iWork.com isn’t a closed environment in which collaborators need an Apple ID to view or comment on your document. While the author of the document needs to enter their Apple ID and password to establish an account at iWork.com, the only thing collaborators need to do is to click on the link emailed to them when you name them as a shared user. As long as they are using a recent browser, then, irrespective of platform, they’ll be able to log in.
5. Real-time collaboration
This is one of iWork.com’s best – and largely undiscovered – features. If one of your collaborators is commenting on your document, you can read their comments in real time, turning iWork.com into what is effectively a chat messaging system. A practical benefit is that if you have multiple collaborators, they can each see each others’ up-to-date comments, so there’s little risk of comment duplication, even if people are viewing your document at different times.
6. It’s free
Those who remember iTools will no doubt suggest that Apple is more than likely to charge for iWork.com’s services at some time in the future, but at the moment it doesn’t cost a penny. Any Apple service that carries that sort of price tag is worth enjoying while it lasts.
7. It’s better than it used to be
I realise that as early as reason number 7 I’m drifting into faint praise, but if you tried iWork.com in the first few weeks after its announcement, it would be easy to have permanently dismissed it. Still, it has been slowly improving behind the scenes. Some features that weren’t there when it was launched include the ability to password-protect documents and be notified by email if someone makes a comment.
Even better are the latest enhancements, which allow you to create a public URL so that anyone can access your document. Public visitors won’t see the comments, but if you’re a designer mocking up something in Pages or testing a Keynote presentation and looking for a bit of feedback, you can post the public URL on Twitter and let others see instantly what you’re designing.
8. It’s iPad-ready
Another recent improvement made by Apple to iWork.com is that the service is now optimised for the Mobile Safari web browser on the iPhone and iPod touch. This is presumably to do with the arrival of the iPad. You should be able to download documents from iWork.com to edit in iWork on your iPad. The feature’s already there in the Shared Documents section, but downloading to an iPhone doesn’t do anything.
It’s still not perfect. You can’t, for example, edit text on the iPhone – a limitation, though, that’s shared by Google Docs – and neither can you add comments or notes. Still, to offer a colleague a quick preview of something you’re working on the go, it’s ideal.
9. File translation problems disappear
So what if you’re the only one in your group who uses Pages? Sharing on iWork.com means this doesn’t matter. When you upload the file, everyone can see and comment on it no matter what platform they’re using, and you can let viewers download the file in Microsoft Office and PDF formats, as well as iWork. The only caveats that I’ve discovered when sharing with PC users is to avoid using commas or other punctuation in an iWork document file name, as Windows users seem to have problems opening it if you do.
10. Emergency collaboration for other apps
You know Pages can happily open Microsoft Office files, but what if you’ve prepared artwork in InDesign or QuarkXPress and want to gather comments on it? Here’s a solution that works after a fashion.
In InDesign or XPress, save the document as a PDF. Drag the resulting file into an open Pages window and then share the document on iWork.com. Note that you can only drag a single-page PDF from the Finder into an iWork page. To add a multi-page PDF, open it first in Preview and drag each page’s thumbnail separately from the Preview sidebar over the Pages document window. It’s a handy way to gather quick comments on a mock-up.
