Apple to update iWork, bringing back features from iWork '09

At the iPad Keynote last month Apple introduced the new iWork suites for both iDevices and Macs. The apps have been redesigned from the bottom up and built with 64-bit in mind. Several users however have complied that the new versions lack fundamental features included in previous versions.

Now Apple has responded to the complaints by stating that they will be restoring features over the next six months, this is what they wrote on their support site:

The new iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.

These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.

In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.

These are some of the features Apple specifically mention will be restored over the next six months: 

Pages

• Customize toolbar
• Vertical ruler
• Improved alignment guides
• Improved object placement
• Import of cells with images
• Improved word counts
• Keyboard shortcuts for styles
• Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view

• Customize toolbar
• Improvements to zoom and window placement
• Multi-column and range sort
• Auto-complete text in cells
• Page headers and footers
• Improvements to AppleScript support

• Customize toolbar
• Restoring old transitions and builds
• Improvements to presenter display
• Improvements to AppleScript support