iWork 11? 12?

Tom Gewecke wrote:

Actually the lack of improvements is kind of amazing. Bugs with right to left languages persist after 7 years of complaints. Vertical text layout available in the iOS version and Color Emoji introduced in 10.7 are still not supported.

I also think it is amazing. Can it really be a rational business decision to omit support for more than half a billion of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Japanese and Urdu speakers, just to name a few of the not supported languages?

It may be very hard to implement the support for some technical reason, and it may be so boring to implement that some development manager simply does not want to do it. However, surely the return on investment would be high.

And then there's the fact that Numbers is good for little more than a few sheets/tables with simple sums. Anything more and it grinds to a halt. My ZX spectrum did sums faster (and I'm a Mac fan by the way).

It's a shame!! Apple don't update iwork by 3 years!! NO COMMENT

It is open source. That means they don't get paid. Put yourself in their place. "Money for nuthin' and chicks for free...lah lah lah" Have you tried for support from all open source providers. The core code is essentially the same.

I've been with Apple since the Mac-bootable Lisa and present policy of at least incremental improvements is better than completely dropping apps that were cutting edge when they came out like MacWrite, HyperCard, the excellent Pascal incremental compiler IDE that almost anyone could learn to program because of its immediate code hilighting and completion, and many others. While current policy is not ideal, it is an improvement. I'm more concerned with the never-ending growth in complexity of the development frameworks with out more "wizards" to assist the average person to write apps that use data stores, etc. Just look at the tutorial that shows how to say "Hello World!". It has so many steps that it is almost ridiculous. I don't have my life to dedicate to constantly trying to keep up with new features that are requiring more and more hand-coding and reading of documents that are incomplete or out of date the day they are released.

I'm just about to switch from Office 2011 to Pages and Numbers, seeing as my migration to the new machine prompts office to ask for my product key which I can't find (to me it's no wonder people pirate MS software given that they make legal ownership such a PITA - I should be able to see and/or retrieve MY product key from MY software installed on MY machine!!)

Basic though they are I have a feeling Pages and Numbers will do all I need now but am not prepared to buy 2009 versions that are clearly way behind the pack. Hopefully a 2012 version of both will be out this year.

TechAddict wrote:

I Hopefully a 2012 version of both will be out this year.

Now that they have been updated to work with Mountain Lion, the main pressure for any new versions is off, and I would not bet on seeing one in the near future.