iWork suite gets updated

Apr 4, 2018

iWork suite has been updated!
From Pages 7.0 release notes

Two-Page View and Facing Pages: view two pages side-by-side, and format them as double-page spreads.

Pages has been my to go app for every text work in years.
I wrote countless random documents, wrote and set layout of both my bachelor and master thesis, designed a whole songbook with lyrics and chords, and - even more surprising - made a photo book ready to be professionally printed on industrial offset printers. I am using it in these very days to make a flier for work and miss it every time I need to use Word for work, as managing images with it gets me angry in no time. Since the rewriting of Pages, 5 years ago , there were features I deeply missed. Text-boxes linking has made its way back only recently (with much joy on my side) and today's facing pages has brought back one of the features I missed the most, both emotionally and functionally. Facing pages had allowed me to make wonders in the past and I think it's the one feature that introduced me to the pleasure of nicely laying down elements on a page. It finally brings back one of the characteristics that, for what I use Pages, made it a truly high level app.

From Keynote 8.0 release notes:

Donut charts: Use donut charts to visualize data in an engaging new way.

This is albeit a smaller ones, but it made me smile. I don't use keynote very much, but each and every time I need to make a presentation I look nowhere else.
Keynote is a place I seldom visit, but one that makes me feel at home every time I come back.
Such was the case in Dec '16, when I needed to make a slideshow to discuss my master thesis. I wanted donut charts, but keynote didn't support them. I looked online for some kind of alternative solution, but there weren't. I even tried ignoring it and placing whole pie-charts, but they weren't what I was looking for: I wanted donuts and were to set for nothing less. In the end, I got clever and placed a disk with the exact same color gradient of the background on a pie chart, making the illusion of donut.
With this latest iWork release not only Keynote, but every app in the suite gets donut charts support. In Apple's style, support isn't only for a mere fixed chart: slices can be individually set apart and data labels too have settings that can be tweaked.

I love how iWork is gaining back the features it had, while maintaining the lightness these new versions have had. It was the premise and promise we had had when the rewriting had become in 2013, I'm glad to see word has been kept.

PS: here are Number's release notes for the sake of completeness

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