Apple Announes iWork; Updates Keynote, All New Word Processor (UPDATED)

January 10th, 2005 at 2:00 PM - Macworld Expo by Brad Gibson

SAN FRANSISCO -- Before a standing room only crowd at the Moscone Convention Center, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced iWork, a software suite that includes a upgrade of Appleis Keynote presentation package, and Pages, a new word processing application.

Mr. Jobs called Keynote version 2 "a major upgrade". Among its new features includes 10 new themes, animated text, animated builds, a presenter display, the ability to do interactive slide shows, and a kiosk slide show feature. Keynote 2 improves upon the original with slide animations to synchronize the movement of multiple objects, real-time animated text, and image masking. It includes the iLife media browser for insertion of photos, movies and music directly into presentations.

In addition, Keynote has added Macromedia Flash, PDF and QuickTime output capability.

Pages is Appleis newest word processing application. Calling it a word processing application "incredible sense of style," Mr. Jobs showed a long list of features including footnotes, table of contents and more, but played up its 40 Apple-designed templates as a key feature.

Mr. Jobs said Pages sports "advanced typography," multiple columns, footnotes, tables of contents and styles, as well as dynamic text wrapping and alignment guides.

Also included is an iLife media browser that lets users drag and drop photos from the iPhoto library directly into documents.

Mr. Jobs said iWork will retail for US$79 and will be available January 22.