The icons are new, as are the marketing phrases stuffed into the app names.
I gave some first impressions on Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle earlier this week, but one thing you don’t get to see when things are under embargo is how it all rolls out to the general public, which it did on Wednesday.
What strikes me most about it is how even Apple is stuck with the App Store and its limitations. Developers are quite familiar with how limited Apple’s back-end systems are and how they can inflict frustration on developers and customers alike. But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.
For example, yesterday the old versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote were updated, apparently with the only new feature being a dialog box that appears when you launch it that says “Use the New Version of Numbers,” with a button to Open New Version.
Why? Seems like Apple has chosen this moment to unify the iPad and Mac versions of Numbers and its fellow apps in a single entity in the App Store, and that leaves the old versions high and dry. The right thing to do here would be to gracefully migrate that Mac app and merge it with the other apps, but apparently not even Apple can convince itself to prioritize a feature that would make the launch of its new suite a little less clunky.
