iWork 2009: Worth the money?
I just tried out the iWork 09 30-day FREE trial version available here. I did not give it an extensive workout but from what I have seen, consider this one an Apple donation if you plan to upgrade. I will in resignation and support for an alternative and because of Keynote. Other than that feel free to sit this one out.
I don’t think there are any new groundbreaking features in the Keynote, Pages and Numbers applications. They all have this share on iWork.com link in the menu to enable online sharing and commenting but you could probably obtain the same results with a good old PDF that they all create on the fly. Adobe has made document revision available in the free Reader (provided that the issued document was created in Acrobat, Standard version is at $299). This feature does not compete with Microsoft’s track changes and a corporate SFTP site. You need a MAC account to use it.
I seldom use Pages and Numbers because I find them to funny to take seriously. Excel and Word are tough customers to beat and— ubiquitous. As I said before, they almost pack too many features. However, after years in Lotus and Excel, I am still learning new tricks.
Keynote has a definite edge over PowerPoint but its small market share makes it hard to recommend. Others have died before, competing in the business presentation field (Adobe Persuasion, Harvard Graphics (still barely breathing), General Parametrics Videoshow, Corel, LMSoft and others). Still Keynote is my favourite business presentation software and Apple only needed to add one transition effect to incite me to upgrade. And they did.
