iWork Goes Cloud.

Every self-respecting Mac user discusses iOS 7. There has been another,  less discussed but nevertheless revolutionary announcement: iWork for iCloud beta-version coming this Autumn.

Apple's website says:

"iWork has always been the best way to be productive on the Mac. And iWork for iOS made it easy to create beautiful documents on iPad and iPhone. With iWork for iCloud we’re bringing Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to the web — on Mac and PC. And thanks to iCloud, your work is always up to date on all your devices."

This is something I predicted in March last year when Apple decided to phase out, effectively to cancel, it's paid web-based service iWork.com. In the face of competition from Google Drive (Google Docs), a similar free-to-the-user service, Apple had nothing to do but adapt and move on. 

iWork for iCloud could be an enhanced replacement of the discarded iWork.com.

Unlike iWork.com, iCloud is free and developed primarily for use with mobile (hand-held) devices, such as iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, that are part of the fastest growing segment in computers.

iWork users have been complaining that the programme hasn't been updated for quite a long time. Apparently Apple's strategy is focused not so much on developing, or rather cluttering with new features, the already powerful and elegant suite, but on making it more compatible, perhaps to the point of seamlessness, with other similar programmes, like MS Office or Open Office, and, secondly, making it accessible on multiple devices with Cloud, including PCs.

Which makes perfect sense both in terms of usability and marketing. A growing number of people have more than one computer at their disposal, ranging from desktops to laptops to tablets to smartphones. Making one licensed iWork version work on all these makes it more attractive. Even more so now, that iWork's applications, the text and graphic processor Pages, the presentation programme Keynote and the spreadsheet app Numbers, can be bought separately as stand-alone products.

There is more. Early versions of iWork had compatibility issues with MS Office and weren't easy to share via email or web. Currently, iWork documents can be easily exported to Word, PDF and other widely used formats and mailed. For e-publications iWork is compatible with the popular ePub format and can be published via Apple's own iBooks. It looks like Apple is making a further step in compatibility when various formats can be shared though the Document Manager and iCloud Mail.

As Apple's site says:

"It’s easy to work with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Just drag them to the Document Manager and make your edits, then share them in iWork, Office, or PDF formats via iCloud Mail."

There are limitations, though. You can get a Google account entirely free, for example when you sign up for gmail. To get access to the Apple service, you must have a piece of their hardware. As columnist Amy Gahran explains:

"The downside, compared to Google Docs, is that you must have an Apple ID to access this service, which means you must own at least one Apple device. Also, you can only share editable documents with other Apple ID accounts. Therefore, iWork in the cloud is not really "free." In contrast, you don't have to purchase anything to use Google Docs."

Steve Jobs' Widow Steps Out.

Laurene Powell Jobs.

The New York Times interviewed Steve Jobs' widow Laurene, who until recently has been a very private person. She is rated as the world's ninth wealthiest woman with an estimated fortune of $11.5 bln.

Here are a few excerpts from the NYT feature via Yahoo Finance:

"Two years after Mr. Jobs’s death, Ms. Powell Jobs is becoming somewhat less private. She has tiptoed into the public sphere, pushing her agenda in education as well as global conservation, nutrition and immigration policy. Just last month, for example, she sat down for a rare television interview, discussing the immigration bill before Congress. She has also taken on new issues, like gun control.

"Ms. Powell Jobs is best known in the education field for College Track, which she started in 1997. The group helps prepare low-income students from underserved communities for college, providing rigorous academic training and extracurricular activities. The program, which operates in a number of locations including East Palo Alto and New Orleans, has trained more than 1,400 students and sent 90 percent of them to college.

"Her involvement with immigration flowed from College Track. In its early years, a number of her students in the program were teenagers who had come to the country, unauthorized, at a young age and finished high school, but then could not obtain citizenship or receive any state or federal funds for college.

"Ms. Powell Jobs has a net worth estimated at $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, most of it in shares of the Walt Disney Company. Mr. Jobs helped found the animation studio Pixar, which Disney acquired in 2006 and paid for in stock. With 131 million shares, worth about $8.7 billion, the Laurene Powell Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest shareholder with a 7.3 percent stake in the company, and she has benefited from the stock having more than doubled since her husband died in October 2011.

"Mr. Jobs also owned 5.5 million shares of Apple at the time of his death, and it is unclear whether she has sold her position."

And here's a short Bloomberg interview with her and then another video about her fortune.

Photo from the Government of Chile's official website.