SYNCING
There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. Its a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing.
Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep.
What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. When I read a bunch of new email messages using my iPad or iPhone, when I next sit down at my Mac, those messages are marked as read in my inbox. I dont have to do anything on the Mac for that to happen. Thats just how IMAP works. I can add a new calendar event on my Mac, then walk away from my computer, take my iPhone out of my pocket, and the event is there. I can add a note to that event using my iPhone and a few moments later the note will be synced to the event on my Mac.
Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, theyre marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, theres the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like Im living in the future using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I dont worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually its just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.
The data flow with these iWork apps isnt like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesnt matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets arent there. Heres an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What Id like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac:
Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isnt a more recent version of it on my iPad.
Open the file on my Mac and make changes.
Save.
Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB.
Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad.
Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPads Numbers app.
Sync.
Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers apps My Documents list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numberss file sharing list to Numberss My Documents.
And, again, its effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you dont make a mistake and inadvertantly make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, youre stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document.
The bottom line, obviously, is that there is no way that anyone is going to use these iPad apps in the way I describe above.
