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Engadget publishes a hands on with iCloud.com and the iWork beta. iCloud works as we described, acting as a replacement for MobileMe with Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Find My iPhone interfaces.
They go into a little more detail about how the iWork interface works on the web. iWork in iCloud is primarily a sync and download service, rather than an editing service:
You can't create iWork files using the iCloud web interface, but if you've enabled sync on your iOS device, documents you create will appear almost instantly on each app's respective webpage. From the Keynote tab, you can view and download each presentation as a Keynote file, PDF, or in PowerPoint format. Pages documents can be downloaded as Pages files, PDFs, or in Word format, and Numbers spreadsheets can be exported to the desktop version of Numbers, PDF, and Excel.
The following video show iWork editing and creation between the iOS apps and the iCloud web interface:
One interesting addition, however, is that users can upload documents to iCloud/iWork. This lets you quickly upload documents that will instantly sync back via iCloud to your iOS apps.
AppleInsider also notes that Apple is actively recruiting for an iWork web developer which could indicate they are working to further expand their web support for the iWork suite.
Top Rated Comments
Why is the guy in the video so focused on how fast things show up in iCloud and transfer to other devices? It all depends on one's bandwidth.
Is it just bandwidth? I got the impression that he was impressed by how quickly the iCloud server was keeping up with his iPhone.
Given these features, I hope some kind of guest access is available, to help share in both directions with other (non-Apple) users/systems.
They have this already with iWork.com (https://www.iwork.com/signin/). Hopefully they'll merge it with iCloud and finally bring it out of beta.
I really wish I could edit the documents on the icloud site similar to google docs or other variants.
Nothing to neg at all. You are completely right. It would be excellent if iOS and Lion were all in sync with my pages and keynote documents, which could then also be edited online, even with less functionality.
And being able to upload (or let others upload?) to your iCloud from any old computer’s browser, and instantly have the file on your iPad/iPhone/Mac sounds great as well!
Given these features, I hope some kind of “guest access” is available, to help share in both directions with other (non-Apple) users/systems.
Well, if all the changes are pushed automatically to all your devices, then aren't you effectively "working on the cloud version" of the document at all times? If all devices are linked to the cloud, I don't see the difference between that and editing a document that is only stored on the cloud (Google Docs). Maybe I'm missing something, but the only difference seems to be that your machine saves a local copy while saving changes to the cloud.
How about working on it from a Windows machine... or a machine that isn't yours? The benefits of actually working on a document just through a browser are numerous, just as webmail has uses and applications.