Pixel Envy: “Exploring the New iWork for Mac File Formats”

Why are file formats important? While it’s unlikely that applications will be wiped off the face of the earth, it might be important for you to ensure that any document created now is readable in the future. If your document is written using an app which saves files in a byzantine proprietary format, you may not be able to recover it in a few years’ time without having access to that same application. Nick Heer

This update to iWork just keeps getting better and better: not only does it remove features for advanced users, it’s also significantly slower and switches to a proprietary file format with no backwards compatibility! This makes it much harder for other apps to handle the files and basically impossible for users to retrieve text inside the files without using iWork. Some have speculated that this change makes it easier to sync files back-and-forth with mobile devices, but that only serves to underline iCloud’s limitations.

For some perspective, the much-hated Microsoft Office made the transition in the opposite direction more than 6 years ago, switching from the closed binary formats (.doc, .xls, etc.) to more readable XML-based files (.docx, .xlsx and so on) in Office 2007.

Charlie’s Diary: “Why Microsoft Word must Die”

Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it? Charles Stross

There’s a saying among photographers that goes something like a good photographer can make great images with any camera, while a bad one blames his gear for the results. That’s how Charles Stross sounds like here – you can guess what type of writer he is…

But it gets worse: as he openly admits, Stross doesn’t even use Word himself, he’s just complaining that publishers use this format and so he needs to deliver his drafts as .doc files! This whole article smells like flame-bait, beating around an old and tired theme to get some attention. I guess his latest novel doesn’t sell that well…

Daring Fireball: “Thoughts and Observations Regarding This Week’s Apple Event”

That’s all in the past now. My understanding is that it’s been a long slog to get here — here being where these apps and all OS updates are available free of charge — the details of said slog being the sort of convoluted bean-counting that would put anyone who doesn’t wear a green eyeshade to sleep. But this too — I think — is why the iLife and iWork apps are only free with the purchase of a new device and for users of previous versions. Apple’s not trying to milk money from those customers ineligible for the free versions of these apps (although, of course, they will happily keep the money). It’s simply the fallout from Apple’s accounting guidelines that they cannot simply offer these apps free of charge to everyone. John Gruber

Wow, the excuses Apple fans can dig up to justify its decisions! I have worked in accounting for several years and in my experience it’s the accounting that follows business decisions, not the other way around! Maybe it’s different in the US – though I doubt it – but, as long as the business practices are legal, there is a way to reflect this in accounting.

Bishop Fox: “LinkedIn ‘Intro’duces Insecurity”

LinkedIn released a new product today called Intro.  They call it “doing the impossible”, but some might call it “hijacking email”.  Why do we say this?  Consider the following:

Intro reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers. You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining to… whatever they feel like.

Bishop Fox

Redirecting private, sensitive, confidential information through another third-party. What could possibly go wrong?

MacSparky: “AppleScript and the New iWork”

It’s concerning to see that this new version of iWork has not only not moved forward on automation but instead backwards. I don’t use a lot of AppleScript in iWork and, frankly, I don’t know what the percentage of people is the do. However, for those people that do use AppleScript, it is huge. David Sparks

Free software from Apple! What could possibly go wrong?

The Wall Street Journal: “Might Google Have a Sly Motive Behind Motorola?”

Here’s a theory that I’ve been playing with: What if profits aren’t part of the plan at Motorola? What if Google’s plan for smartphones isn’t to directly make money for itself but, instead, an attempt to destroy money for other companies by making the phone a commodity device?

Farhad Manjoo

That actually sounds like something that New Google would do – in a sense they’re already trying that with the Chromebooks with little success. But I have a feeling the deal was actually done in a such a hurry that nobody had a chance to make long-term plans. Larry Page made an ‘ego-purchase’ for patents that turned out to be not very valuable; now they’re just trying to find a place for Motorola in a mobile market already dominated by other players who don’t really have Google’s interests at heart.

Flickr Blog: “Join us in previewing Flickr’s new photo experience”

Over the coming weeks, we share many more details of the new photo experience here. But for now, we invite you to test it and provide us feedback. Please keep in mind that this an early look into what is coming and that not all features are available yet. Darren Bradley

Best thing about it? Flickr finally renamed the ‘Add as contact’-button to ‘Follow’ – something they should have done a long time ago since this is very much a one-way connection like on Twitter or Instagram.