Apple has published a response in regards to its new iWork suite that released on 22 October, making clear it will reintroduce some of the features from iWork 09 in future releases of iWork.
Apple took the applications in iWork 09 and rebuilt them from ground up. They are now fully 64-bit and support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta. With these changes however came the loss of some popular features. And critics took note.
After presumably receiving many complaints from iWorks users, Apple has issued the following response: "In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork 09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis."
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As for why the features weren't included in the first place, Apple didn't provide an exact explanation. One could guess that Apple ran out of development time and simply decided it was all right to push out a streamlined yet less-feature-rich version of iWork. Whatever the reasons, Apple has sort of apologised by outlining upcoming iWork features:
- Pages will get the following features: customise toolbar, vertical ruler, improved alignment guides, improved object placement, import of cells with images, improved word counts, keyboard shortcuts for styles and manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view
- Numbers will get the following features: customise toolbar, mprovements to zoom and window placement, multi-column and range sort, auto-complete text in cells, page headers and footers and improvements to AppleScript support
- Keynote will get the following features: customise toolbar, restoring old transitions and builds, improvements to presenter display and improvements to AppleScript support
Apple typically releases small, incremental updates for its iWork apps, rather than introducing a raft of new or major features. The company appears willing to change this pattern though, as it plans to release the above listed improvements within the next six months. And it will continue to add new features in the future.