Exploring the New iWork for Mac File Formats

Interesting post by Nick Heer, looking into the new iWork document formats. The big change is that most document data is now spread across a series of small binary files, as opposed to the single XML files the iWork app used previously.

Drew McCormack, following up on Heer’s piece:

The post concludes that it is unclear why Apple would take this apparently backward step.

I don’t know for sure, but I think I can take a pretty good guess at why they have done it. It has nothing to do with being malicious, or trying to stop people seeing into the document’s format, and it has everything to do with iCloud and iOS devices.

And for good measure, Michael Tsai on the file sizes and document read/write performance of Numbers 09, Numbers 13, and Excel 2011.

★ Monday, 28 October 2013