Apple iWork is a suite of applications for office work that is compatible with both Apple iOS and OSX platforms. The office suite comprises of the application Keynote; a program used to make presentations, Pages; an application used for creating documents, and the spreadsheet application Numbers. The iWork suite of applications is thought to be made with the prosumer market in mind with simplified features found in Microsoft Office for Mac, or the open source Libre Office software. The iWork applications also have touch screen support and compatibility with the iCloud software.

Common Components

Products in the iWork suite of applications have some common components which come from them sharing a similar application programming interfaces like Cocoa and other APIs. Among these common APIs are the multi-lingual spell checker application used in Safari and Mail. Other common design features include the color picker, grammar checking system, and the find/replace application.

Also common among all iWork applications is the underlying document called the ‘canvas’ which is a generic container type of document that is used to provide a layout and storage mechanism in the Apple applications. Each application in the Apple iWork suite uses the canvas as a background and then places its own components on it to create a different program. In the Pages application for instance, the large text box is the central feature in the application when it is first opened, but this can then be altered by the user in any way they like. Similarly in Numbers, the spreadsheet application, the app opens with a grid of cells like a typical spreadsheet but the user again has a lot of freedom to play around with the data on the canvas.

The iwork model is thought to be based on the earlier Apple designed OpenDoc which had a similar underlying document engine, along with a single on-disk format.