iWork is an
office suite of desktop applications created by
Apple for the
Mac OS X and
iOS operating systems. The first version of iWork, iWork '05, was released in 2005. The suite originally bundled
Keynote, a
presentation program which had previously been sold as a standalone application, and
Pages, a combined
word processing and
page layout application.
[1][3] In 2007, Apple released iWork '08, which contained a new
spreadsheetapplication,
Numbers.
[4] iWork also includes access to
iWork.com, which came in iWork '09 (released in 6th, January 2009), a beta service that allows users to upload and share documents online with others, who can download them and give feedback.
[4] iWork integrates with existing applications from Apple's
iLife suite through the Media Browser, which allows users to drag and drop music from
iTunes, movies from
iMovie, and photos from
iPhoto and
Aperture directly into iWork documents.
[1] Although iWork is billed by Apple as "a successor to
AppleWorks",
[1] it does not replicate the functionality of AppleWorks's
database and drawing tools.
[5]A well known issue and shortcoming, is the inability of iWork to create content in RTL (right to left) scripts (Such as Arabic, Persian, Hebrew). While TextEdit, the basic text editor provided within Mac OS X excels in creating and rendering these scripts, and while iWork has the capability to display some RTL texts in different contexts, creating new content, or editing existing content can be challenging. Features like Document/paragraph writing direction are missing, so editing paragraphs or longer texts in Hebrew, Arabic, can be daunting. Strange behavior in breaking lines, punctuation, mixed script text, impede coherent editing.