iWork for iCloud Beta Available to All Users Ahead of iOS 7 Launch

iWork for iCloud Beta

iWork for iCloud Beta

Apple on Friday quietly updated iCloud website to give access to iWork for iCloud to all users. If you head over to iCloud.com and log in you will see icons for iWork suite of web-apps. iWork for iCloud was previously available only to developers.

iWork for iCloud includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers ready to use in the supported browsers to create or edit documents. The user interface of the new web apps for the cloud is very similar  to the iOS versions of the apps. When you launch any of the iWork apps in Cloud, you automatically get access to all the previously uploaded documents for viewing and even editing.

All three apps are very well designed for the web, you don’t require any separate plugin or software installation on your hardware. Just launch the web browser go to iCloud.com and you’re ready to create or edit existing documents.

Pages, Numbers, Keynote support all the themes that come bundled with the iOS equivalents. The web apps even support complex image manipulation like setting borders, transparency, reflection, opacity etc. Keynote supports theme transitions however in the beta individual elements could not use any build-in or build-out animations. Re-ordering slides works just as you expect and feels very intuitive. Numbers does not support editing charts in the beta however, Apple does mention that the feature is coming soon.

Overall the web apps perform extremely well, its hard to believe that you’re in a web browser. From dropping image from the desktop to the document to resizing, masking and even cropping Apple has shown that it can create beautiful and responsive web apps.

It’s worth noting that iWork for iCloud does not include any collaboration options. So, if you are the owner of the document only you can edit it. Viewing revision history is not supported. It is possible that the company could be working on expanding the sharing and collaborative features and  could launch it the near future.

What are your thoughts on iWork for iCloud? Do you see yourself using these web-apps? Are you excited about using Pages, Keynote and Numbers now in your browser? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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