One of Apple’s unsung announcements from its WWDC keynote on Monday was iWork for iCloud, a full, complete solution for editing and syncing documents in the cloud. iWork for iCloud, which will be going head to head with Google Drive, is already extremely polished and well done, even as a developer beta.

While fully updated iOS and Mac apps will be arriving later in the year, the web versions of the apps are available privately today.

In the above video, we walk you through the beta interface of iWork for iCloud, as it appears in Safari.

This post was written by Michael Steeber from 9to5Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

 

Apple’s new ‘iWork for iCloud’ suite of browser-based apps are now ready for testing. Developers received a notification today that iWork for iCloud is up and ready for a test drive.

iWork for iCloud allows users to edit any iWork document from a web browser. The programs will run on a PC or Mac as long you’re running Safari, Chrome, or Internet explore. iWork for iCloud includes browser-based versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

To access the new service, developers can head to beta.icloud.com and log in.

 

 

Source: Apple

Via: FSM

The post iWork For iCloud Beta Is Now Open To Developers appeared first on Cult of Mac.

This post was written by Buster Heine from Cult of Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

Live on stage at Apple’s WWDC keynote presentation this morning, CEO Tim Cook has opened things up with the usual updates on some of the company’s core businesses and accomplishments over the past year. Sharing numbers on how its products have been selling and outpacing the competition has become somewhat of a tradition for Apple keynote addresses. Below you’ll find a roundup of the stats that Cook shared today including info on retail stores, iPhones and more:

-6 Million registered developers, 1.5M in last year

-WWDC sold out in 71 seconds

-1 daily visitors at Apple retail

-Millions of customers come for personal training

-407 stores in 14 countries

-50 billion apps

-900,000 apps (93% downloaded each month)

-375k iPad apps

-575,000,000 store accounts (more accounts with credit cards than any store online)

-paid developers 10 billion (3 times more than all other mobile platforms combined)

-72 million Mac installed base, #1 U.S. desktop

-Mac is up 100% vs PC up 18% over 5 year growth period

-#1 in satisfaction

-28 million copies of Mountain Lion, best selling release of all time

This post is updating live… refresh for updates. 

This post was written by Jordan Kahn from 9to5Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

We’ve got a pretty good idea of what Apple intends to give us at WWDC. Even the things we’re not so sure about seem on the radar.

But what does Apple need to do long term to tighten up the ecosystem and bring some excitement back into its hardware, software and services? I’ve got a few things…

1. iCloud – I’m not sure how Apple gets to iCloud Nirvana from where they are now, but iCloud needs to turn into a full OS in the sky. The idea behind iCloud is that you really don’t know it is there but it is backing up and synching all of your files across all of your devices all the time.

The end game for Apple should be this:

• I sign into a new Mac or iOS device and all of my data is synced to and from the cloud just like a Time Machine backup is done.
• iCloud works mostly that way on iOS now save for individual app settings and such but it should extend across platforms.
• My music, photos and videos should sync across devices too.
• Documents and files should all be versioned  as well so that I can go back to older backups.
• All of this should be transparent to the user and happen in the background.
• When I go offline, I should be able to have all of this data, or what I’ve chosen, to come with me using intuitive Cloud/Local settings.

Oh, and make it do everything Dropbox does with ease of Airdrop.

I realize this would take an incredible amount of resources – storage, bandwidth and maintenance – but it would be worth whatever price Apple charged to never have to think about backing up or losing data again. Here’s Steve Jobs describing something like this in 1997.

2. App Stores.  Even five years after the iOS and then the Mac App Store were released I still have some gripes about how they work.
Security: Why after all of the brute force hacks on user accounts do we still need to have an active credit card on file for one click purchases? Can’t I just leave that blank, have some credit and put on every once in awhile. Why does Apple ask for Carte Blanche every time I download a free app? Yes, I know I can get a Visa Gift card or something similar to keep a hacker from draining my account on his friends’ apps. But there should be a way to opt out of Apple’s “We have X hundred million customer credit cards on file”.

Also, I would like to not have to sync up 300 iOS apps worth gigs of data on my Mac and be reminded when these apps need upgrading. It is time to divorce Mac iTunes from my iOS devices.

While we’re on the subject of the App Stores, why are they so slow? Even on an iPhone 5 or Retina iPad, I find the App Store painful to load. It often takes like 20 seconds for the store to start up and each switch between tabs is another ‘put the device down and wait’ moment. The Mac App Store isn’t much better on speed.

There is also a lot of inconsistencies during logins. I have a fairly complicated password (helped in part by Apple’s insistance that I change the password every few weeks) and I often have to enter the password 2 or 3 times to make a purchase.

How can Apple fix this? The App Store should be able to operate in the background so when you open it, it is ready. App updates should download and/or install automatically if I choose to let them (like Google Play) so you don’t have to do these manually. Overall policy on passwords should be a user preference –as in, if I’ve entered my password within the last few minutes, another password prompt shouldn’t be invoked.

3. Messages for Mac – Messages may be the worst Mac App Apple has ever made and this isn’t for some obscure app or peripheral app like Podcasts. Messaging is very important on the Mac – most folks I know use it all day every day.

Even with the recent update with the order of iMessages (only took a year), it still freezes often and leaves me with a lot of  blank chats and sometimes even sends messages to the wrong recipient  Perhaps Apple needs to start over with a better integration of all of the Facetime, iMessage, AIM, Google Talk/Hangouts, Skype, Facebook, etc. services under one roof. Maybe the best course of action is to buy the Adium team or Trillian to expedite the process rather than throwing B-listers at it in their spare time like what it currently feels like is happening.

4. iMessages/Facetime – These services need to be carrier level reliable if Apple expects people to rely on it instead of SMS or phone calls. It clearly isn’t there yet. Not even close. It would also help if Apple’s iCloud status knew before we did that critical services were down. Clearly there are humans reporting these services and they almost always are about 30 minutes late to an outage. What’s the point of having a status page that reports outages long after all of the blogs?

5. Android Apps: I think we know by now that Android isn’t going away and depending on who you ask, it is either the dominant or one of the dominant platforms out there for phones, tablets and TVs. If we are going to rely on iMessages for messaging, we should have a way to reach our Android friends and relatives.

Apple should build iMessages and FaceTime for Android (Remember when Apple announced Facetime, it was supposed to be Open Sourced for other platforms?) so I don’t need separate apps for each of my friends. Google clearly is building a cross platform solution for Hangouts which will eventually render Apple-only solutions obsolete. Even Blackberry recently opened its BBM service for iOS and Android.

Also, I’ve spent a lot of money on movies and music in iTunes. I’d like to be able to play that media on other platforms. Just like Amazon, Netflix, Google Play and others make the media I buy available cross platform, it would be nice to be able to go to grandma’s house, sign in, and start using my iTunes media – even if it is just a bare-bones web version of iTunes in the Cloud. Until that happens, it makes more sense to buy a movie or music on Amazon rather than iTunes. I haven’t purchased music or videos on iTunes in over a year because of this.

6. iLife + iWork. What year is it? Hint: It’s not 2011.  Let’s see some innovation here? Looking at Microsoft’s Office in the Cloud or Google Doc’s real time collaboration should provide some motivation for iWork. iLife has stagnated. I would love for iPhoto to be able to handle much larger databases of pictures and movies.

7. Expert or Classic mode in Mac OS X. Since Snow Leopard, Apple hasn’t added much in the way of useful interface features in the Mac OS. The “iOSification” has made it easier for iOS users to use Macs but for those of us who’ve been here since the 80′s, these new features just serve to complicate and obfuscate the core things we’re after. Apple has also started hiding “dangerous” folders from novice users like the Library.

I know there are different utilities and commands that revert many of these changes but it would be nice if I could just check a box in the SysPrefs to get rid of Launchpad, let me see all of my folders including system folders and my media, and maybe get a little bit of OS performance back for my troubles.

We’ve heard some features like tabbed browsing are coming to OS 10.9, but clearing away some of the extra garbage would be nice.

8. Turn Photostream into a Social Network.  Add some more storage space/longer than 30 day memory, much more granular sharing settings and a little of the ol’ iWeb magic re-imagined and it would go a long way. If all of my photos are already in iOS, why do I have to go to Facebook or Google Play to share them with my friends? Charge me a few bucks to make a Photo book for the web.

9. Apple TV. We’re pretty sure Apple is working on some cable browsing software to control the cable box (with Kinect-like hand gesture input) after giving up on a streaming all-IP network (or maybe they are still waiting for that?). But in the meantime, there is a lot Apple could do with the current hardware that is already selling in unit numbers far above the ‘hobby’ range.

• Obviously an App Store for TV would be huge for content folks. Stations could become apps. HBO Go should be a good example.
• Firecore (above video) and others prove that people would pay big money for a more open AppleTV. That means the ability to play media from network attached storage including AVI’s and WKVs too. Jailbreakable AppleTVs sell for double or triple of the higher spec 1080P versions that are still locked if there is any question of the demand.
• Make AppleTV an Airport base station. It has Ethernet in and Wifi so why do I have to buy another $99 Airport Express product? Also, Apple could make a cheaper version in the HDMI Stick format that is becoming very popular.
• Bluetooth. Apple recently let Bluetooth keyboards talk to Apple TV. Now how about Bluetooth mics via Siri? The hardware as it currently exists would allow this.

These are very doable software updates to current the current product, not any hardware design.

10. Pros. Tim Cook’s background is in operations so he sees a resource allocation risk/reward for Apple’s different product areas.  Pros have gotten the shaft over the past 5 years. In hardware. In software. And even in services. The thing that probably hasn’t been measured is that Pros outweigh their marketshare in influence. Everyone asks experts what to do on making Apple buying decisions. These are the people that reccomend products for all of their families and friends. Apple hasn’t been keeping these people happy and they’ve been leaving (Final Cut Pro high enders have been migrating to Adobe or Avid for example).

We’re hoping Apple finally has some good news for this very small but important (and loyal!) market segment of the Apple user base.

One more Bonus gripe: Apple Stores. Can we announce a successor to Ron Johnson already? Browett has been gone almost as long as RoJo and still theres no hint of a replacement. Maybe RoJo’s the guy, part 2? Or perhaps Cano? Tim Cook hasn’t exactly been hitting them out of the park with his SVP external hires so perhaps an internal one makes more sense. Apple Stores are great now, but they would be even better with another retail visionary at the helm.

Live Coverage.

Apple’s approximately two hour keynote address begins at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern on June 10th. Apple doesn’t typically offer live streams of its events these days, but we will be live in San Francisco providing full coverage during, before, and after the keynote presentation.

This post was written by Seth Weintraub from 9to5Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

(Preparations for Apple’s 2013 WWDC developer conference /image via Nick)

There’s a lot we already know about what we’ll be seeing next week at WWDC– we’ve already brought you exclusive details on iOS 7, OS X 10.9, a MacBook refresh, Apple’s new Radio service, and much more. What else might we see Apple show off next week? Below are a couple of our best predictions based on what we think Apple is most likely to show off as well as few things we’ve been hearing:

iCloud | Notifications |

Over the last year Apple’s iCloud service has been plagued with what feel like almost monthly outages, and the service is less than reliable for something that’s supposed to ‘just work’ without the user paying attention. One big feature that could be headed to iCloud, alongside updates to the current Photo Streams feature, is video streams. We heard about it last year from the Wall Street Journal and our own sources that Apple had it in the works, so it could be something that finally makes an appearance at this year’s WWDC. Dedicated iOS and Mac apps for iCloud would be a long shot, but we’re at least expecting to see an overhaul and new features for iCloud.com. We’d also expect Apple to address some concerns for developers around syncing iCloud data with rewritten, new and improved APIs.

And when it comes to end users, we’d imagine improvements to Notification Center, including notification sync between apps and all devices, to be a big priority. Notifications that don’t sync between Mac and all your iOS devices, i.e.the fact that clearing a notification on one device (either from within Notification Center or an app) doesn’t automatically clear it from Notification Center on all devices, is a big annoyance. iCloud and Notification Center, especially on the Mac, have some major issues, and we’re expecting Apple to address that next week at its keynote.

Messages |

When Apple first launched its Messages Beta leading up to the release of Mountain Lion users complained of problems with crashes, messages failing to sync across devices, disappearing/out of order chat history, and lack of basic features like timestamps for each message. Unfortunately most of those problems haven’t gone away, and the state of iMessage on iOS isn’t much better. We’d like to see some new features baked into Messages on iOS like a quick-reply feature to send messages from anywhere in the OS, but we’ll settle for some big performance improvements to Messages on the Mac and possibly some design tweaks to go along with Jony Ive’s redesign of iOS 7.

Developers |

A few things we’re expecting to see for developers at this year’s WWDC include updates to Xcode and iTunes Connect. Google rolled out some big new features to its Google Play developer console last month including beta testing & stage rollouts, as well as an app translation service. We’re expecting to see some improvements to the aging iTunes Connect portal, but we’ve also heard a few other things on the table for next week. It’s possible we could see Apple launch a competitor to Parse, the cloud app platform that provides “a scalable and powerful backend in minutes” for mobile app developers.We’ve been hearing whispers of the service, but it’s not clear if Apple is going through with the project.

Something else you’ll likely see next week: Live code previewing in Xcode, with features similar to Google’s new Android Studio tool. Other possibilities could include OS level XPC support and other inter-app communication APIs for iOS.

Mac Pro | Logic | Final Cut Pro X |

Apple hasn’t introduced a major update to its Mac Pro line since July 2010 and pro users have certainly been vocal about it. Apple somewhat disappointed last year with quiet, minor upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup, but later confirmed that new Mac Pros were indeed on the way later in 2013. There have been rumors floating around in recent months, the latest claiming Mac Pro Project manager Douglas Brooks said the team is working on “something really different.” Apple already announced one is coming, so pre announcing by a few months wouldn’t harm sales and WWDC’s audience of devs and other pros would be the expected venue for the new machine to make an appearance alongside updates to Apple’s pro apps.

It’s possible one of those pro apps will be Final Cut Pro X, the redesigned app that many professionals took issue with over a stripped-down feature set. Apple has recently been making an effort to win back those pro users, and it’s possible we’ll see even more updates during WWDC next week. Another one of Apple’s pro apps that is in desperate need of an updates is Logic Pro. The app has largely remained untouched since a major update back in 2009, although Apple did decide to move it to the Mac App Store in 2011 and significantly reduce the price. Since we’ve had mostly bug fixes (and there’s a lot to fix), so of all Apple’s pro apps, a new Logic Pro might be the one to look out for at WWDC.

There have been rumors that Apple will launch a “Logic Pro X” version of Logic, but it hopefully learned from FCPX that a stripped down feature set just won’t work for the pros (leave that to GarageBand). Apple has already reportedly confirmed that a new version of Logic Pro is in the works. Adding to the pressure, Logic’s biggest competitor, Avid, just launched the latest version of its industry standard software, Pro Tools 11.

Maps |

We already know Apple is working on some improvements to Maps integration for modern car center-consoles, and it could very well show off the new feature as soon as next week alongside improvements to Siri Eyes-Free for car manufacturers. With the controversy over Apple’s Maps app following its launch, expect Apple to take some time to focus on all the improvements it’s made to the service in recent months, including the addition of new 3D Flyover imagery, improved turn-by-turn navigation, and other fixes. Apple has had a year to improve the experience, and possibly think of some new features that will help win users back.

iLife | iWork |

With the last major update back in 2010 for iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand on the Mac, the iLife suite is long due for an update, especially when compared to its iOS counterpart. Tim Cook already said this event will focus on software, and we’re thinking updates to iPhoto and possibly iMovie and GarageBand on the Mac are possibilities. iPhoto has a ton of different issues with Photo Streams, large uploads, and the UI just feels dated compared to the iPhone and iPad versions.

Apple has been looking to hire a lot of engineers and animators for the iLife team in recent months to “re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work,” and we think at least iPhoto will be seeing some major improvements next week including a more iOS-like experience for the Mac app.

Last updated in December, Apple’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps for Mac actually haven’t seen a major overhaul in since closer to 2009 (apart from Retina & iCloud support last year). The most recent update brought mostly compatibility with the latest iOS iWork suite, and the Mac apps are certainly due for a refresh. While Pages has certainly been a big hit for Apple on iOS, it’s leather navigation bar and linen backgrounds could very well become a victim to Jony Ive’s iOS 7 redesign next week.

Offline Siri |

We’ve discussed the possibility of an offline Siri feature before. If Apple is to follow its past release cycle trends with the next-generation iPhone later this year, history tells us there’s a good possibility the device could have an exclusive software feature relies on the upgraded hardware. Offline Siri could let users use dictation, control music, launch apps, or place calls without requiring an internet connection, features that already exist on Android devices, and the expected upgraded CPU would make it a possiblity. This is just one feature that could possibly make an appearance next week, but maybe Siri will also finally come out Beta with some other new tricks to stay competitive with Google Now. Wouldn’t it be nice for developers to allow their users to use Siri.

Live coverage |

Apple’s approximately two hour keynote address begins at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern on June 10th. Apple doesn’t typically offer live streams of its events these days, but we will be live in San Francisco providing full coverage during, before, and after the keynote presentation.

This post was written by Jordan Kahn from 9to5Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.