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With the likes of Google Docs and Zoho establishing a viable role for online office apps and Microsoft promising tight web integration for Office, iWork.com is certainly timely. Documents can be uploaded with a single click on the iWork.com icon in the Keynote, Pages or Numbers toolbar. Viewers can provide comments and notes and download a copy of your document in iWork, Office or PDF formats, while consolidated online list of all your shared documents indicates when comments have been posted. The service has launched as a free public beta, accessible through iwork ’09, but Apple eventually expects it to be a paid-for service.

Online elaborations aside, iWork ’09 also provides notable new features for all three of its applications.

Pages has a new Full Screen view designed to let you focus on your document without any distractions, revealing the menus, format bar and page navigator only when needed. An Outline mode includes templates that help to quickly build the framework for your document and allow you to collapse, expand and rearrange elements, even inline graphics. MathType 6 support lets engineers, mathematicians and students easily add sophisticated equations to their documents and EndNote X2 integration lets users add and edit comprehensive bibliographic references. Pages

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’09 also includes 40 new Apple-designed templates, including newsletters, posters, certificates and coordinated stationery.

Keynote introduces Magic Move, which allows you to apply a simple transition to automatically animate the position, scale, rotation and opacity of any image, graphic or text that is repeated on consecutive slides. New text transitions morph text from one slide to the next, while new advanced object transitions animate objects off one slide while simultaneously animating objects onto the next slide with a choice of effects. 3D charts now include cylinder shapes, bevelled-edge pie charts, new textures and four new 3D build effects. The Keynote Remote application, 59p at the App Store, lets you view slides and presenter notes and control your presentation with an iPhone or iPod touch.

Numbers provides a new way to quickly categorise data by column, which you can then collapse, expand and summarise to easily make sense of large sets of data. It also simplifies formula writing with an enhanced function browser that includes built-in help for over 250 functions, and visual placeholders with tool tips that explain each variable in a formula. A the new Formula List lets you view all formulas in your entire spreadsheet and jump directly to any formula cell with a single click. Expanded chart options include mixed chart types, two-axis charts, and the ability to apply trend lines and error bars. Perhaps most usefully, Numbers charts pasted into Pages or Keynote are linked, and any changes made to the chart in Numbers be updated in the other app with a single click.

iWork ’09 is now available for a suggested retail price of £69 (inc. VAT) or for £54 (inc. VAT) with the purchase of any Mac from the online or retail Apple stores.