iWork for iCloud beta | Hacker News Reader

iWork for iCloud beta

apple.com

36 pointserickhill45 comments

I used to complain about iWork all the time, but now that I'm a complete cog in Apple's diabolical machine (MBA, iPad, iPhone), I've realized two things:

1. Office for Mac is terrible relative to Office for Windows, to the extent that I get actively frustrated when I try and use it (which I sorta suspect was a design goal.)

2. Google Docs hasn't particularly improved since I started using it.

Seeing as I've more or less given up trying to do heavy Excel work, I need to basically do pretty markup, pretty data, and pretty presentations for non-technical clients. Being able to display it easily on the iPad would be wonderful.

Huh, when did you start using Google Docs?

What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.

I for one find the interface positively infuriating. I don't have it installed any more, but when I was using Office 2011 for Mac I found that its integration into the OS, from copy/paste to basic UI principles, was horrible. It felt, frankly, as bad as using OpenOffice -- software which is designed to run mostly as-in on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

It sounds like Office for Mac is just like iTunes for Windows, then.

Precisely :)

Or, depending on who you ask[0], precisely the opposite.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwx...

Counterpoint: I'm a several-times-weekly user of Word and PowerPoint in Office 2011, and I don't find them troublesome to the extent you do. My workload is small documents and presentations (usually < 50 pages, but with lots of graphics, typically 0.5-40MB all told). Typically exchanging documents with Windows and Mac users.

I often use PPT to lay out simple diagrams, for instance, in preference to Illustrator.

I could see how some things can get on your nerves (auto-formatting, reformatting of pasted objects, and I don't like the spelling and grammar check either) but I couldn't call it infuriating. And it did not approach using OpenOffice. I think you must be exaggerating there?

It's funny, I thought I was the only one -- I too find it drives me nuts, but there's no single overarching reason why, it's hard to explain.

There's just so much about it that's "not right" -- it doesn't feel like a Windows program, doesn't feel like a Mac program, performance issues... it's hard to point to any one thing, but it's just not pleasant.

(Whereas I used Office on Windows for years, and it was great.)

Just a random example, this morning I was trying to use Cmd+A to select all the text in a field in a dialog box, which kept activating a button which started with A instead, and there wasn't even a visual cue for it. That's not Windows OR Mac behavior, just totally broken behavior. And it's just full of those things.

Oh god, yes. I noticed that cmd+a thing (I really want to call it a bug) a while back. That's the kind of nonsense I expect (and receive) from something like GIMP on OS X. But a program that was coded from relative scratch to run on the Mac?

It's really bizarre all around. Surely they don't want it to suck for the purpose of driving people away from the Mac... wouldn't they just want people to use their format?

I wonder if Word:mac is the bastard-child of corporate conflicts of interest...

So here's something I don't get:

They've done Pages in the browser. Ok, great. So that would use HTML5, right? And take advantage of modern web browsers' layout compatibilities, complete with CSS styling, and all the cool new stuff like CSS regions & shapes. Right?

Apparently not.

If you go into Pages and open up web inspector, what you'll see is not a nice clean HTML structure with the text written in HTML and formatting in CSS. Instead, you'll see a large collection of dynamically-generated SVG <text> elements, with pixel-exact positions explicitly specified, even to the level of the horizontal locations of individual glyphs. This effectively completely bypasses the browser's own layout capabilities. They appear to have written their own layout engine in javascript, or perhaps ported over the existing native Pages one.

Any ideas why they would have taken this route? Apple and Adobe have both been doing some fantastic work on improving WebKit with better layout facilities, and Microsoft have been doing the same with IE. Things are pretty good in 2013. Why not leverage that work?

My guess is that it's because browser support is inconsistent, and Apple needs to have a 100% flawless experience on ahem less-well-engineered browsers. Positioning the SVG elements precisely ensures that nothing is cut off, and there aren't any visual oddities. Writing your own layout engine is a great way to ensure a consistent experience across multiple rendering engines.

Most of Apple's other online services (particularly all of their dev tools) instead just require Safari.

`contenteditable` has a lot of issues once you go past casual text editing. Sounds like it's doing something similar to Google Docs (using the browser simply as a dumb renderer, and doing a lot of the calculations/layout in JavaScript).

Because Pages is not a web page editor, it's a word processor and page layout system. The intended output is essentially a printed document. In fact (checking out the beta) when you share a document you can choose to email in Pages, PDF or Word format. HTML is not presented as an option.

Can you explain the difference between a web page editor and word processor? (this isn't meant as criticism; I'd just like to understand your perspective, as I personally view them as being in the same category)

a web page is dynamic and has infinite vertical size. a print document has a static A4-sized layout.

To me, they're totally different.

Web pages are limited by HTML capability, and based on infinite-length documents of variable width.

Word processors deal with pages (page numbering, margins, footnotes, columns, set page widths) with much more complex text flows, and the output needs to look exactly the same on every screen and every device.

This isn't a surprise at all. You need total control over layout and UI elements. SVG has a lot of advantages over canvas, specifically it can take advantage of hardware acceleration and doesn't have the text layout quirks that canvas does.

If you think about what it would take to build a User Interface toolkit you would use in a desktop application in HTML5 you can see lots of problems. There is simply too much abstraction in HTML5 to do what Apple may have wanted to do. Cross-browser quirks are unavoidable and performance can be very difficult to get right especially with interactions in the DOM. Even if you can get performance right there may be issues with producing the exact layout in each browser or the designers intention in the first place.

SaaS is outside of Apple's expertise so it'll be interesting to see how this goes. I've tested the beta and it's very impressive, but where Apple has trouble is scaling its internet services.

It's amazing how much Google has upended not only the market for, but our expectations of "Office" suite products. When I first clicked the "share" button in Pages, I was actually expecting an "invite a collaborator" option and was disappointed until I stopped to remember what a massive infrastructural achievement Google's real-time document collaboration system is.

I'm sure such functionality will eventually come to iWork, and it's undoubtedly very impressive already, but it's a reminder of just how wide Google's lead is at present.

This service doesn't really seem like it needs anything in particular to scale; it's just a static asset-load of Javascript. All the "magic" is done by talking to the same iCloud backend that the installable version of iWork does, which was already scaled to the point where this would just be a blip.

I'm referring to file storage and syncing across devices. It's not particularly easy given that Dropbox is an entire company devoted to this cause.

Awhile ago Bret Victor tweeted:

"Human race shoots self in foot, builds prosthetic replacement, completes 100-meter dash. Introducing iWork For iCloud."

Can anyone explain what he meant?

My understanding of that tweet would be that he is echoing the general sentiment that many technologists share that the web has made people excited about technologies that were better written half a decade ago.

For example, all the hullabaloo about creating basic sprite-based games or simple WebGL models. Such stuff has been possible on the desktop for many years, but suddenly because it's in a browser everyone seems to lose their mind over the technical amazement of such developments.

To relate this back to the tweet, I believe Bret was saying that Apple is touting iWork for iCloud as a revolutionary product, when in fact it is a pared-down and buggier version of software which has existed on our desktops for years. It's sort of like breaking the wheel to reinvent it.

I've played with the beta, and it's pretty neat being able to have what almost feels like a desktop quality experience in a browser. It does have a bit of an iOS 6 feel to it with gradients and drop shadows, which is surprising.

I would use "XCode for iCloud".

What advantages would that give you over using Xcode on a MacBook?

I could develop anywhere. On a windows machine, on a friend's laptop, even on my iPad I guess (hopefully)

I suppose we shouldn't expect Firefox compatibility anytime soon? The iCloud calendar icon's been broken on Firefox for a while now:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5182304

It's probably because Firefox does not support many presentation attributes as well as proper font antialiasing for the text and tspan SVG tags. It looks like they did create their own text layout engine with support for flowing around arbitrary shapes.

I'm curious how well this works, since emulating native text capabilities (just think RTL vs LTR) requires an insane amount of Javascript and the performance is pretty terrible for texts longer than a few hundred words. If they got this right, it must be a masterpiece of Javascript code. Google recently introduced their own text layout capabilities in Google Docs (also SVG based) and it's pretty buggy beyond simple text. Just to highlight the complexity of the issue, they used to render text into SVG on the server until recently.

It's one of the reasons we had to use foreignObject with pure HTML inside for Moqups instead, although it prevents us from supporting IE at all, including IE 11. We can at least target Webkit/Blink & Gecko this way.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-shapes-1-20130620/

No screenshot of iWork on Chrome. Only IE and Safari : )

Google's the main enemy for Apple these days, far more than the folks up in Redmond I'd say.

What is everyone talking about? The Chrome logo is there and so is this:

"iWork for iCloud works with Safari 6.0.3 or later, Chrome 27.0.1 or later, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8 or later. "

I know it's there. It's just that they dont take screenshots of iWork on Chrome.

That actually makes sense. As on the OS X side of things Apple are only going to promote their own browser, and on the Windows side of things, they need to convey that it works on a PC (which a lot of people will interpret from seeing IE). Showing Chrome doesn't say to mum and dad PC owners that iWork will work on their machine.

No Firefox compatibility?

iM an iDiot

Beautiful - Keynote for iCloud crashed my Safari on 10.8.4...

I saw these appear a month ago and then they disappeared from iCloud.com for me. Am I the only one?

I tried them a month ago, they're still in my account.

iCloud.com sucks. They're trying to replicate iOS UI and functionality in the browser and it's an abysmal failure. Steve Jobs always liked to tout Apple and their employees as artists. Well artists have to know their medium and that's something Apple really needs to work on.

Edit: What's with all the down votes? This is valid criticism.

Might be because the discussion is about iWork specifically, and you haven't really explained why iCloud is an abysmal failure.

iWork for iCloud which is a part of iCloud.com. I'm strictly speaking of the website for iCloud. It's awful. It takes a long time to load and is stuck with a clunky user-interface that mimics iOS/OS X. It doesn't look right and it doesn't feel right. Apple needs to hire people who know how to design a web application.

Maybe there is a topic on a forum somewhere about the iCloud website specifically where your comment might be better received?

Perhaps, but this is just something I said in passing by the thread, so I shouldn't have to seek out another forum. If people want to down vote me because they can't accept that Apple isn't perfect then I reckon that's their prerogative. I own and use Apple products exclusively and I think it's important to point out their flaws. Google has much better web applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com