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iWork 2010: Apple Brings Multitouch Cloud-based Office to iPad

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Just as we thought, iWork 2010 was announced today, and it's taking full advantage of the new iPad's capabilities, namely multitouch. It's the most exciting thing to happen to slide-based presentation software in decades.

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The big update here is to Keynote, iWork's PowerPoint equivalent: Multitouch is actually a pretty great way to create and view slides. In iWork 2010's Keynote, you can drag, resize and move elements around on a slide, including photos and text, which is a natural way to do things. Animations and transitions are added from a list of pre-generated ones.

Next up is Pages, iWork's word processor. Without a hardware keyboard, word processing seems tricky, but there are definitely elements that can be improved with multitouch: Scroll through text, select text via touch, navigate through different pages, that kind of thing.

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Now, Numbers, which (let's be honest here) is the party-starter of the group: Spreadsheets. The screen seems like a hindrance here, but having a constantly adapting calculator is kind of a cool idea. We'll see how usable it actually is, but it definitely addresses some of the square-pegged "it's not businessy enough!" iPhone haters. Also, it is about as pretty as a spreadsheets app could be.

And now we've officially got the prices and compatibility list. They're each $10 ($30 in total, in case you flunked second grade math), are compatible with the upcoming Mac versions as well as projectors (nice!) and will be available at the app store. [Apple iPad]