The fine folks over at Ars Technica have done a very thorough review of what’s new in iWork ’09. Writing for Ars Technica, Iijitsch van Beijnum highlights what works in terms of the new features and what doesn’t.

New features reviewed:

• iWork Tutorials
• Template Chooser
• Send via email Share option
• iWork.com

Pages:

• Running word count
• Full screen mode
• Mail Merge
• Equations: MathType
• References: Endnote

Numbers:

• New number formats (duration, numeral system)
• Fill>Up, Fill>Left
• Formula List
• Reorganize Table function
• Category Rows

Keynote:

• Equations: MathType
• Share menu
• Touch gesture support for laptops with the latest trackpads
• Magic Move
• Text Transitions and Object Transitions
• Guide Lines
• New Presenter Display
• iPhone or iPod Touch Keynote Control app

Problems:

• No auto-save with any of the apps
• No support for OpenDocument format or SVG images
• iWork.com really doesn’t do much other than share documents

Pages:

• Endnotes & footnotes
• Equations: MathType

Numbers:

• Decimal point or comma and day and month still controlled by settings in System Preferences
• Reorganize Table panel is confusing

Keynote:

• No more export to Flash
• Send To>iDVD creates “terrible looking DVD’s”
• Missing some transitions from previous versions

van Beijnum concludes with:

“Other than the support for equations through MathType, and possibly references through Endnote, the improvements in iWork '09 are evolutionary, not revolutionary. When I look at the pros and cons in the iWork '08 review, they pretty much all apply to iWork '09, too. iWork.com and category rows are a nice try, but no cigar—yet. The only (possibly) compelling new feature is MathType. Everything else is mostly just polish.

So for the casual and non-mathematical iWork user, this upgrade isn’t really necessary. However, for the power users there is a lot to like, and for those who need an office suite, but don't have one yet, iWork'09 is a great value for the money. Microsoft Office may have more advanced features, and OpenOffice may be free, but neither of them is as polished, easy-to-use, or well-integrated with Mac OS X as iWork.”

If you’re on the fence on whether or not to upgrade, the review is a very good read. You can also download the 30 day iWork ’09 demo over at Apple.

Tags:review, iwork

World of Apple is reporting that OS X 10.5.7 build 9J34 has been seeded to developers with only one remaining issue: Safari 4 beta will only install in 10.5.6. WOA posted a lengthly list of fixes and enhancements that the latest (and previous) seeds address.

Tags:update

Ars Technica has posted and article (with images ) detailing Apple’s apparent educational iMac listed at $899. The white 17” iMac comes with:

1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
1GB RAM
160GB hard drive
24x Combo drive
Intel GMA 950 graphics

As Chris Foresman of Ars Technica puts it:

“Though the pricing is attractive, I'm not sure it represents a great value in the current market. The combination of a 1.83GHz processor, max 2GB DDR2 RAM, combo optical drive (DVD-ROM + CD-R/W), and Intel integrated graphics is pretty underwhelming. Given many schools' 3-year or longer equipment cycles, those buying this cheaper iMac would end up with what is essentially 5-year old equipment by the time its reached the upgrade cycle. And without the NVIDIA 9400M graphics, this model would see little benefit from a Snow Leopard upgrade.

Likewise, with the old design and underwhelming hardware, I also wouldn't expect Apple to ever offer this to the general public.”

It makes sense for Apple to offer something for the educational market but we agree that the configuration is “underwhelming”. Check out the full article here.

Tags:imac, education

Skorpiostech Inc., released Transactions 1.0 last week and is available at the iTunes App store for $29.99. Transactions allows users to accept credit card as a form of payment right from their iPhone or iPod Touch. Transactions works by processing the credit card transactions through Authorize.net or PayPal. Transactions features:

• Works over Wifi, 3G or EDGE.
• Fast data entry with smart field completions.
• Transaction log view with the ability to export to your home or work computer.
• Password protected settings.
• Confidential information is secured using Apple’s Keychain.
• Import customer data from your address book.

Transactions requires an Authorize.net or PayPal Website Payments Pro account and iPhone OS 2.2.1. Obviously, if you’re using it on an iPod Touch, you’re also going to need a WiFi connection. Skorpiostech posted an FAQ on their website that shows you how to set up Transactions on your iPhone.

Skorpiostech is also offering Transactions Lite, a free version of the app that allows users to process up to two approved credit card transactions every 12 hours. We installed Transactions Lite and following the FAQ were able to set it up no problem. We haven’t actually processed any transactions yet as we don’t want to pay the fees assessed by PayPal. However, the app seems to be a solid app and if you need a budget friendly, mobile credit card processing solution you should give it a look.

Tags:app, financials

MacRumors is running a short article on what might be included in the next iPhone OS. Funny thing is that the possibilities they list mirror our list from yesterday. According to the article BoyGeniusReport is claiming MMS for OS 3.0 and that John Grubber of Daring Fireball listed Push Notifications, a new Springboard and copy and paste. We read DF so maybe subconsciously we just parroted Grubber. Either that or the iPhone OS sorely needs these features. As for the BoyGeniusReport, well, we like to think of ourselves as geniuses but we’re not delusional about our collective IQ. “Box of rocks” immediately comes to mind when we set to pondering and cipherin.

Tags:rumor

Engadget is reporting that Apple is previewing iPhone OS 3.0 on March 17th. They got an invitation for the preview which will also include a look at the iPhone SDK. The shortish Engadget post also states that they’re expecting no releases of any actual software as the invitation says that the event is “an advanced preview of what we’re building”. The event will take place at 12:00 P.M. CST and Engadget will be liveblogging the preview.

We here at AYAAW sincerely hope that Apple includes the following with OS 3.0:

• A better way to organize/move apps around.
• Copy & Paste.
• Push notifications (battery friendly of course).
• MMS texting.
• A better way to organize/move apps around.

That’s not a typo. We really, really want a better way to organize/move apps around. After the third or fourth full screen of apps it’s a big pain in the ol’ arse to do anything other than let iTunes just plunk them in the first available spot. From an organizational and productivity standpoint that’s just plain inefficient.

Tags:announcement

To coincide with the release of the new Shuffle, Apple yesterday released iTunes 8.1. Apple updated the Genius sidebar to include movie and TV recommendations, improved speed when importing large libraries, added sync support for the new Shuffle, improved parental controls and added iTunes DJ. According to Macworld:

With iTunes DJ, iPhone users that have Apple’s Remote application installed can request songs to be played. Users can also vote to control when songs are played. The DJ feature even has its own preferences, so you can send a welcome message to users and control whether voting is turned on or off. You can also require users to type in a password to access iTunes DJ’s features.

We’re not sure about the utility of the new iTunes DJ but you never know, it might be useful to some.

iTunes 8.1 should be available via Software Update and as always is free.

Tags:itunes, update

Am I the last to notice this or is it a new feature of Gmail? I’m talking about the little badge at the bottom right corner of Safari’s window that shows the name of the sender of the next email in a reply in a threaded conversation. This isn’t earth shattering but kind of cool and I never noticed it until today. Check it out for yourself. I’m running Safari 4 but I doubt it’s restricted to the beta version.

And yes, it’s been a slow news day.

Joseph Henry

Tags:new, gmail

Whew! We’ve been absent too long and want to tell you why. Our production machine, a 24” Intel Core 2 Duo iMac began a long, slow spiral into sluggishness the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It was bad: click, SBOD, click, SBOD, click, SBOD. You get the picture. Being the small outfit that we are we didn’t have a good backup plan (by backup play we mean alternate plans set in place in case of emergencies) in place before having to resort to a complete erase of our hard drive and reinstallation of OS X and all our apps.

In terms of actual backing up, we had a Time Machine backup in place and we Carbon Copy Cloned our hard drive to another external FireWire hard drive. When the iMac’s sluggishness finally pushed us over the edge we nuked the hard drive and started the arduous process of bringing it back to life. Two weeks later and we’re finally back in business, literally.

It was not fun. The Maxtor FireWire drive we used for our clone hasn’t outright failed but it certainly has issues and about half of our clone had incorrect permissions applied. Not only that but a goodly portion of our Documents folder had been somehow corrupted in the process. So, we thought we could just restore from our good old reliable Time Machine backup. Not! Despite creating what we thought was an exact duplicate of our old account, Time Machine wouldn’t restore any files: none, nada, zilch, zero. In fact, it just put the little red Stop sign symbol on every folder, basically giving us the finger when we tried to restore anything.

The moral of our sad little story is that you shouldn’t count on Time Machine to completely restore after an erase of your hard drive and reinstallation of OS X. Its great for restoring the occasional email or file you accidently deleted but for heavier duty, like providing a complete backup for your hard drive that you can make a complete restore from, we’re not sold on it. Certainly, plenty of folks have been able to restore from it, we couldn’t though. As for the other half of our backup plan we’re blaming that on Maxtor/Seagate and are just going to toss that bad boy in the recycling bin. We’re chocking it up to bad luck and moving on.

Fortunately we didn’t lose anything critical and we’re now back up and running.

Tags:update