Clickable mockups

Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. We’ve done this with companies like HomeAway, AVOS, and Duo Security by designing a few screens in a flow and then building a clickable version, using basic consumer software tools like InVision or Apple’s Keynote.

At first I thought these prototypes would be too rough to be useful. But time after time I’ve seen customers engage with click-throughs like they’re real products, and that helps you learn if the designs are working. It’s a great method to use before engineering starts to build a design.

Customer interviews

Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.

It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.

If you want to know more, we created a research guide with plenty of tactical tips for finding and interviewing customers. Now you have no excuse. Get out of the building! (Then come back — there’s more good stuff below.)

Fake doors

You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. We did this with CustomMade, a startup that lets people order custom-built products. Our idea was to let visitors save others’ projects for inspiration. But instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we knew we were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement. For more on fake doors, see Jess Lee’s excellent talk.

Recon

When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.

So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.

Micro-surveys

Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.

We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.

And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. Here’s more on micro-surveys.

Prototype with real data

Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.

When we were designing coupon pages with RetailMeNot, we needed real coupon data in order to evaluate our designs. So we built a prototype in two days. It was buggy and didn’t have many features, but it was just enough to get useful feedback from customers. And it was good we did, because it turned out that half our ideas weren’t working.

We iterated three more times, building prototypes and showing to customers, and were able to get to a design that improved both usability and click-through rates. Few startups build true prototypes, but it’s an immensely useful way to learn fast.

Site visits

Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.

Recently, we were working with Foundation Medicine to improve their clinical cancer genomics reports. So we decided to visit oncology centers, watch how doctors used the reports, and see what we could learn. We were surprised to discover that the reports we’d worked so hard to design were often received by fax. Tiny text was hard to read and all color information was lost. It was an easy problem to fix, but we only noticed it through a site visit.

Being a lean startup means that we should first consider all these ways to learn, and then pick the fastest, cheapest method. I’ve listed seven methods that we’ve found work well at startups, but there are plenty more out there. Once you start looking, you’ll be surprised at the variety of ways you can learn incredibly fast, saving you and your team precious time and money (and heartache).

Braden Kowitz leads Google Ventures Design Studio. Follow him on Twitter@kowitz or through his team’s blog Design Staff.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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My frustration with this had grown over the last year. The iPad has become a frequently used writing platform for me because it’s always with me. Byword was fine for a lot of my writing, but I wanted the greater control over my text that Pages gave me. And getting spreadsheets and Keynote files to and from my iPad was a hassle with Byword. Having to go to iCloud on the web to share files wasn’t an ideal solution: I just wanted to see my edits across all my devices.

Now, with the release of OS X Mountain Lion on Tuesday, and updated versions of the iWork apps (which also now have Retina display support) I can finally sync and edit files across all my Apple devices.

The obvious points before we get started

To fully take advantage of sharing between iOS and OS X you will need the following: the updates to the OS X and iOS iWork apps released July 25 or later, and Mountain Lion. If you haven’t upgraded yet, go ahead.

iOS:

Once you’ve got them installed, on iOS go to the Settings app, choose one of the iWork apps and make sure “Use iCloud” is set to On. Underneath that is a slider that asks you if you want to open copies of iWork ’09 files. Due to discrepancies in the file structure, this allows you to keep the original file structure preserved by opening a copy. I don’t like having copies floating around and I don’t tend to have complicated files, so I’ve unchecked this.

Note: You will need to repeat this step for all three iWork apps.

Also, in the Settings app, go to iCloud and make sure that Documents & Data is also turned on.

OS X:

Setting up Documents in the Cloud for OS X is a little easier. Go into System Preferences, choose iCloud, and make sure Documents in the Cloud is enabled. You do not need to do anything in the individual application preferences.

Sharing down the dream

To save a newly created document in iCloud, from the Save menu, choose iCloud. You can also choose the folder to save it in, if you’ve already created one up there.

To open a file from iCloud, from the Open dialog box, choose the iCloud tab and then the file you want to open.

To move a file to iCloud, from the File menu choose Move To, and then select the iCloud tab and follow the same process as saving.

When I originally wrote about Documents in the Cloud last year, I was disappointed with how often I lost data. Since then, the service has improved significantly. My initial tests with Mountain Lion and the iOS versions did not have any glaring issues. Full disclosure: I’m also running iOS 6, but an informal poll amongst a few friends also yielded no glaring issues, save some initial slowness.

There are a few caveats, though. The biggest one is the iOS versions of the iWork apps still do not have all of the features of their OS X brethren. It’s getting better though, for example, in Pages version 1.5 you can now add footnotes and endnotes. This makes the iPad version of Pages a more viable option for students, even though the OS X version of Pages still requires a third-party tool for citations.

How it will affect my workflow

I am a simple guy, with simple needs. I’m also a guy who does very little work on his Mac that requires the full might and power of the Microsoft Office suite. What does, however, occur frequently is being asked to email the latest version of a file to a client. Naturally, this never happens when I’m in the same ZIP code as my Mac.

Starting today, all of my Pages (and other iWork) documents are getting moved to iCloud. When my free iCloud storage runs out, I’ll be paying for the additional space. While my corporate work keeps me chained to a (Windows) laptop, it’ll be nice to be able to work on my freelance work from the beach on the weekends and have my files sync. Where I can see iCloud being very useful is for people who do presentations on their iPads. After you’re done with Keynote on your Mac, just save it to iCloud and you’ll be able to easily access it from your iPad.

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There’s no confirmation of who the speaker will be, but if Apple follows tradition we can assume it will be CEO Tim Cook. Though Cook has never headlined a WWDC keynote — it had always been Steve Jobs, with the exception of SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller in 2009 when Jobs was on medical leave — Cook has been the company’s chief spokesman since taking over as CEO last August.

The entire schedule for the conference was posted Tuesday morning for registered attendees on Apple’s developer website. There’s also an app that attendees can download  to better navigate the schedule and plan sessions they want to attend.

Though it’s a developer-oriented conference, Apple likes to use the opening keynote as a platform to announce a variety of new products. From 2007 to 2010 it served as the coming out party for the company’s latest iPhone. Last year Apple introduced iCloud for the first time at the same event.

What Apple is doing differently this year is that they did not send any official invitations to the keynote event. Not doing so deprives the tech world of intense analysis of the wording and images of said invitation, which may be the intention.

In any case, we expect to hear a lot more about iCloud at this year’s event, as well as possibly get a preview of iOS 6 and a look at OS X Mountain Lion, which is slated for release this summer.

GigaOM will be live blogging the event, so be sure to join us on June 11 at 10 a.m. PT.

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Documents in the Cloud is a way to sync documents and data across your devices. While it may seem like it takes the place of iDisk, it doesn’t replace it. There is no Finder-like access to a file structure. Each app has its data sandboxed, so it’s app-specific. If you open the same file in Pages and GoodReader, and tell each to upload that file to iCloud, you will have two copies of the file up there.

Setting up Documents in the Cloud

The initial setup of Documents in the Cloud is very easy. On your iOS device go into Settings, then iCloud, and make sure Documents and Data is set to “On.” You can also tell it to not sync when only on cellular networks.

To use the iWork apps with Documents in the Cloud, you’ll need to be running the latest versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. The first time you launch each of these apps, you’ll be asked if you want to use iCloud. If you choose to use iCloud, any local iWork documents you have will be uploaded to iCloud, so don’t worry about losing them. However, once you enable iCloud, you will no longer be able to use iTunes to add a document to an iWork app. Using “Open With” from an e-mail still works just fine.

Syncing between iOS devices

Right now, syncing between iOS devices is Documents in the Cloud’s strong suit. Changes made to a Pages document on my iPad show up within seconds on my iPhone. As a control, I performed a worst-case scenario for syncing: I deleted Pages from all my iOS devices and reinstalled it on my iPad. All my files were still there.

This service isn’t limited to just iWork, as games like Scribblenauts Remix will let you use iCloud to sync your saved games between devices. GoodReader for iPad also supports iCloud. The GoodReader for iPhone update is still in Apple’s review queue as of this writing.

Syncing between Windows and OS X

This is where Documents in the Cloud starts to fall down. While there is a Documents and Data checkbox in the iCloud Preference Pane in Lion, I can’t tell where the data is saved to. I also doubt it’s user-accessible.

The only way to get data from my Mac to iCloud right now is via the iCloud.com website. Unfortunately, the only apps that show up on the website are the three iWork apps. The good news is, you can upload and download either iWork or Microsoft Office files from here. The bad news is, if you have PDFs on your Mac you want to get into GoodReader and iCloud, there isn’t an easy option outside of iTunes syncing (that still works for GoodReader).

There are APIs available for developers to use on Windows and OS X that hook into iCloud. My bet is in the long run developers that want to make it easy for users to put data into their apps. Omni Group has said the next version of OmniGraffle for iPad will support storing documents in iCloud, but I don’t see any mention of OmniGraffle for OS X and iCloud. Omni Group tends to be on the leading edge of development, so I’m curious how they will handle this.

Final thoughts

Buyer Beware

I had little faith in iCloud retaining my data during yesterday’s craziness. My tests on seeing if a changed document was properly updated on the web and iOS were successful. However, at least three times when I went back to look at something on the web interface, my documents were gone. I would either have a web page empty of documents or one prompting me to get iWork for iOS. The first time this happened was during the afternoon and I was having trouble updating the apps. I thought maybe one of the apps got rolled back and threw iCloud off. The second time I had noticed my iPhone wanted to download the update again (I think I had deleted it) and I thought maybe something had gotten wonky again. The third time I didn’t do anything. I went to the web page, saw no documents and opened up Pages for iPad and watched three documents delete themselves.

Problems are ongoing. When I create a new document in Pages on iOS, it prompts me to either create a document, or import one even though iCloud is specified in Pages’ settings. This is how Pages worked pre-iCloud, and turning iCloud on and off doesn’t fix the problem.. When this happens, both the iPhone and the iPad can’t see iCloud. At which point I thought to myself: Yep, these are the guys that brought me MobileMe. It’s possible it’s related to all the iCloud launch issues, but I’m very scared to trust it with my data.

These issues aside, until there’s an easy way to always update documents on a Mac or a PC, Documents in the Cloud is of limited use to me. I’m not optimistic this is going to happen any time soon. All of Apple’s promo videos that show iWork on iOS being used with iCloud never show a Mac as part of the chain (the Mac does feature prominently when they demonstrate photo stream). I also don’t like that third-party iCloud-enabled iOS apps can’t register themselves on the website so you can drag files to them.

I was really hoping I would be able to round-trip files from OS X to iOS without doing the download/upload two-step. It didn’t seem like a fantasy to work on a document on OS X Pages, close it, and head to diner and have it magically appear on my iPad. Until Apple and other developers use those OS X and Windows APIs, that fantasy won’t come true.

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Facts and figures.

Schiller also mentioned a few examples of how the Mac App Store has benefited developers. Autodesk, the company behind the SketchBook apps, has seen over a million new users since entering the App Store. Pixelmator, the low-cost Photoshop alternative, has seen a quadrupling of its revenue in the past six months. The Pixelmator app made $1 million in the first 20 days of being available in the App Store — at $30 a piece, that’s over 30,000 new users just in the first 20 days. As Schiller said, the Mac App Store has been a “huge hit for the small players”.

New features

After running through the numbers, Schiller also talked about a few new features coming to the App Store in Lion. First was news that apps will now be able to use in-app purchase, in the same way as iOS apps already do. You will be able to purchase upgrades or add-ons from within the app itself using your iTunes account.

The other new feature is the inclusion of Push Notifications, again taking a page from the iOS book. Just as your iPhone can tell you when something happens with a sound or a message, so will your computer be able to. Think of it like Growl for Mac App Store apps.

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9:31: Pictures from inside the Moscone Center

9:45: The doors are open and all 5000+ attendees are filing in, finding seats, and snapping the requisite crowd photos.

9:57: And now, our own requisite pre-keynote photos of the stage and audience at Moscone:

10:00: Standing ovation as Steve Jobs walks onto stage, 10am sharp.

10:03: Jobs says WWDC sold out within two hours. Over 5200 attendees are here today. Says hardware is the brain of our products, and software is our soul.

10:07: Phil Schiller, SVP of product marketing, takes the stage and introduces Mac OS X Lion, which has 250 features. He says he will be talking about 10 of them today.

10:13: Craig Federighi, SVP of OS X software, takes the stage to demo the first three features introduced by Schiller: multi-touch, full-screen applications, and a “mission control” app navigation feature.

10:17: Phil Schiller is back onstage following Federighi’s demo. He says the Mac App store is now the number 1 channel for buying PC software. Surpassing Best Buy, Walmart and Office Depot. The Mac App store is now built-in to Lion, with in-app purchasing and push notifications.

10:20: The 6th new feature in Lion is called “resume”– when you launch an app in Lion, it brings you right back to where you were when you quit it last. The 7th feature is “auto-save”, that saves a document automatically as you write it.

10:22: The 8th feature is “versions,” which saves each version of a document that’s been auto-saved. The feature looks a lot like Time Machine.

10:25: Federighi comes back on stage to demo Lion’s built-in version of the Mac App Store, which includes a launch pad navigation feature. He also demos the experience of working with documents in Lion, including auto-save and versions.

10:29: Schiller is back onstage. Feature #9 is “Air Drop” which allows you to share documents via a peer-to-peer WiFi based network. Using this feature allows you to drag and drop documents to other users who are running Lion’s Air Drop nearby.

10:33: Schiller announces new features to Mail in Lion, as the 10th feature update. The search function has received a major upgrade with better search features. Federighi comes back on stage once again to demo the Lion Mail features.

10:37: Schiller comes back on stage and announces additional features to the 10 he’s highlighted, such as Windows migration. He notes that the OS has more than 3000 APIs for developers. Lion will be available only within the Mac App Store, he says. Lion will be a 4GB download and can be used on all a user’s authorized Macs.

10:38: Lion will be available for $29.99, $100 less than the typical price. That gets a huge response from the crowd. It will be available on sale to everyone in July, Schiller says.

10:40: SVP of iOS software Scott Forstall takes the stage to provide some iOS numbers. He says more than 200 million iOS devices have been sold, and more than 25 million iPads have been sold to date. Over 15 billion songs have been sold in the iTunes music store, making Apple the number 1 music retailer in the world. More than 14 billion apps from the app store have been downloaded. Apple has paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store.

10:45: Forstall says he’ll announce 10 new features to iOS 5. The first is a better UI for push notifications.

10:46: The new iOS has a notification center where all notifications– voicemail, emails, text messages, Facebook messages, along with stocks and weather, will be updated in one place.

10.47: You get access to the notifications by swiping your finger from top to bottom. The notifications don’t interrupt and it acts like a launcher for the app. Notification center is pretty cool.

10.48: News Center is the new production and it has major publishers who have signed up for the subscriptions. Talking about a whole lot of magazines – the usual suspects. A single place for finding all the papers and magazines in one place. It is like the iBooks, but for Magazines and Newspapers with background downloads.

10.49: And there is twitter. …We are doing a number of things – single sign-ons. Twitter is built into iPhone, iPad and you can sign-in. Logged in and don’t need to sign on again. Oh, Facebook doesn’t like that :-) It integrates with our apps – Cameras etc. You can include Twitter @username in contact list and use Twitter to update photos of your friends.

10:55: When you share an article via email on iOS Safari Reader, the entire body of the story is included in the email, not just the link. Also has added full tabbed browsing in iOS Safari– an announcement that elicited a lot of applause from the audience.

10:58: Forstall announces a new “reminders” feature added to iOS 5. Reminders app is basically a place to store to-do lists. You can associate dates and locations with these reminders– when the date arrives, or when you are geo-located within a certain place, you receive a reminder to do a certain task.

11:01: The 6th iOS announcement has to do with the camera app. iPhone 4 is the 2nd most popular camera overall used on Flickr. There is a new camera button accessible from the iPhone’s lock screen, so that even if there is a passcode set, the camera can be used without unlocking the screen. The volume up button can now be used to take a photo– an announcement that received a big whoop of applause from the crowd here.

11:03: Photos can be edited within the iPhone and iPad now– things such as red-eye reduction, and one-tap enhance are now added into the iOS camera app.

11:05: The 7th update has to do with updates to the mail application. The inbox now has drag and drop capabilities for adding email recipients, and search now includes entire message content. There is also a new feature that allows you to type easier with your thumbs by splitting the keyboard onto the right and left sides of the iPhone or iPad.

11:07: The 8th update, “PC Free”, receives a big cheer from the audience. Now, when an iPhone is taken out of the box, the setup does not prompt users to plug the device into a computer to activate the device. Software updates are now over the air, or OTA, so you  no longer need to plug the phone into a computer to update the mobile device. And instead of updating the entire OS, you just download what’s changed– known as Delta updates.

11:11: The 9th announcement has to do with Game Center. Forstall says iOS’ Game Center now has 50 million users. New updates to Game Center in iOS 5 are focused on making it more social– you can add photos, etc. Now Game Center has support for turn-based games like Scrabble in the OS.

11:15: The 10th update is a new messaging service that works between all iOS customers– on iPads, iPod Touches, and iPads, called iMessage. There are now delivery receipts, optional read receipts, typing indications, and muli-device sync, 3G and WiFi support, and full encryption. Forstall demos iMessage with Apple marketing VP Greg “Joz” Joswiak. iMessage is built on Apple’s own push notification system.

11:18: Forstall goes over a few other updates beyond the 10 he delved into: AirPlay mirroring, which mirrors the iPad 2 to a TV wirelessly. Also, he said iOS has added WiFi sync to iTunes. Forstall also goes into some new developer additions, and says the company will give out iOS Developer SDKs today at the WWDC conference.

11:19: iOS 5 will be shipping to customers “this fall,” Forstall says.

11:20: Steve Jobs takes the stage again to lots of applause. He says he’s going to talk about iCloud and jokes that “I’ll try not to blow it.”

11:22: Jobs says that the status quo of keeping all our information, such as pictures, up to date across all our devices is a broken system. “Keeping those devices in sync is driving us crazy. We’ve got a great solution to this problem… We’re going to demote the PC and Mac to being just a device, and move the center of your digital life in the cloud.”

11:25: iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices, and is completely integrated with your apps.  “You might say, why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe,” Jobs says. He admits that MobileMe was “not our finest hour” but says that the company has learned its lesson. With iCloud they’ve built all the company’s apps from the ground up to work perfectly within this automatically synced system, he says.

11:27: iCloud will be completely free. It also won’t contain any ads.

11:30: iCloud will automatically do daily backups to the cloud over WiFi: Back up includes purchased music, apps and books, your photos and videos, your device settings, and your app data.

11:32: Jobs announces 3 more apps to iCloud– what he says are the “most innovative” aspects of the product. The first is Documents, pages that are automatically stored into the cloud and synced across all your devices.

11:33: Roger Wosner, VP of iWork takes the stage to demo the experience of iWork apps such as Keynote and Pages in iCloud.

11:37: Steve Jobs is back onstage to give more details about how documents are handled . He also announces iCloud storage APIs, so that developers can easily tie their own apps into iCloud storage.

11:40: Jobs announces PhotoStream, what he says is his favorite aspect of iCloud. This automatically syncs Photos into the cloud and across all devices. PhotoStream also works with AppleTV.

11:42: Apple VP of Internet services Eddy Cue takes the stage for an iCloud PhotoStream demo. This app is really slick.

11:44: Steve Jobs takes stage again to introduce “last, but not least– iTunes in the cloud.” Eddy Cue is back onstage to demo how iTunes works in the cloud– it allows a user to sync all the songs he or she has ever purchased, on any device. Any song now purchased on any device is instantly added to all of a user’s other devices. When Cue shows this feature off it elicits a big “wow” from the crowd. Very nice.

11:50: All 9 apps that comprise iCloud are completely free, Jobs says. “We want people to see what these devices can really do, and what the software can do.”

11:52: When you upgrade your phone or buy a new phone with iOS 5, all you do is type in your user name and password, and iCloud is automatically ready to be set up. iCloud users start with 5 GB of free data, not counting songs, books, or photo streaming. Developer beta of iCloud is open today, he says. iTunes in the cloud is available today for end users for iOS 4.3. iCloud in its entirety will be shipped concurrently with iOS 5 this fall.

11:54: “There’s one more thing,” Jobs says to applause. This is “iTunes Match,” which allows users to automatically find all non-iTunes songs and albums that users have ripped themselves and match them with iTunes songs so that they can be accessed via iCloud. This scan and match service will take minutes, instead of weeks, Jobs says. These songs will be upgraded to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free, and will cost $25.99 per year.

11:57: To demonstrate how serious Apple is about its cloud efforts, Jobs shows photos of the third data center that Apple has constructed to help support its iCloud efforts. He says it’s the “most eco-friendly you can make.”

11:59: Steve Jobs exits the stage to another standing ovation from the audience, and that’s a wrap for the WWDC 2011 keynote.

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Here’s what you need to do to get it working:

1. Open the Keynote app on the iOS device you want to use to display your presentation.
2. From the Tools menu, select Settings.
3. Tap on the Remote setting and turn Enable Remotes on.
4. Open the Keynote Remote app on the iOS device you want to use to control your presentation.
5. Tap on New Keynote Link to display a passcode.
6. From the Keynote app on the other iOS device, choose the device name running your Keynote Remote app under the Remote setting, and enter the passcode.

Since you can connect your iPad 2 or iPhone 4 directly to a projector or monitor via SVGA or HDMI, carrying around a laptop computer in order to conduct presentations is no longer necessary if you have a couple of iOS devices. It’d be nice if Apple built Keynote Remote functionality into the Keynote iOS app itself, but a dollar is a small price to pay to go completely mobile and (mostly) wireless with your presentations.

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Consider the hype machine up and running for WWDC 2011. thanks to an official announcement highlighting Steve Jobs as the keynote speaker on June 7 at 10:00 AM PDT. WWDC 2011 will cover five key technology tracks: Application Frameworks, Internet & Web, Graphics & Media, Developer Tools, and Core OS. However, it’s Steve’s appearance that is the real news.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave since January but remains involved in strategic decisions at Apple, last made a public appearance at the iPad 2 launch event in March. That makes for an interesting comparison of  event importance, especially considering that Jobs has skipped WWDC in the past. Last year, Jobs gave the keynote and launched the iPhone 4, as well as the iOS platform, which was previously named iPhone iOS. However, in 2009 Apple’s Phil Schiller did the keynote, introducing the iPhone 3GS, iPhone OS 3, demoing OS X 10.7, and showing off new MacBooks. Considering that this year’s WWDC will reportedly not have new hardware as the next generation iPhone is widely expected in the fall, what non-hardware announcement could be so important as to bring Steve Jobs to the keynote?

Conventional rumor wisdom suggests the event will feature a relaunch of MobileMe (possibly named iCloud) and that service may be free, or at least include free services. A paid service for online storage and streaming of music is also expected. Of course, OS X Lion will be shown, and almost certainly at least a preview of iOS 5. While these are all important products, do they warrant the presence of Steve Jobs? I’d argue that they don’t, and that could mean some other mysterious product will be announced, or perhaps Jobs is returning to Apple full-time. No matter the outcome, TAB will be reporting the event as it happens.

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Apple released a fresh update of its iPad productivity suite iWork yesterday, and what makes it worthwhile is that it finally makes Keynote a useful presentation tool. This update supports core iOS 4.2 features such as AirPrint and multitasking. The update also brings better PDF exporting, and provides some fixes for font issues that arise on export.

As mentioned, the update finally brings the iPad into the arena of truly powerful presentation tools: Keynote for iPad 1.3 now supports a presenter’s view of sorts. However, you’re limited in your choices: you can choose to display current, next, current and next, and current and notes. There’s no option for current and next, and notes, which a setting I use on OS X Keynote all the time.

Since previous versions only showed a black screen with slide advancement buttons, though, even this limited implementation is wondrous news. There’s still no support for any sort of Bluetooth remote, but since that would require an update to the core iOS, we’re not likely to see it introduced anytime soon. Allowing an iPhone or iPod touch with Keynote Remote installed to do the job is technically feasible, however, and something I’d like to see in future iterations.

Numbers, the iWork spreadsheet app, now supports formula entry via keyboard, including predictive function selector. You can also set pagination settings to select how a sheet prints across multiple pages, or choose Auto Fit to let the program choose for you. The best part is, PDF exporting also honors those settings, so you can export them and send them to others without fear of sharing a garbled final product. While I’ve never really needed to print from my iPad, this will make sharing PDFs a whole lot easier. Apple also claims “improved reliability” when exporting Numbers ’09 and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Changes to Pages, iWork’s document editor, are more modest. Support for automatic pagination of tables that cross page breaks has been added, as has the ever-popular “improved reliability,” which probably amounts to a handful of bug fixes.

I’m thrilled with these changes — especially the ones to Keynote. I have a dream of limiting the times I need to drag my MacBook Pro around with me, and these updates go a long way towards achieving this goal. I’m not getting too excited over printing, what with its limitations, but the fast-app switching works great. The updates are available now.

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The iWork 1.2 update for iPad brings about a whole host of welcome improvements, the best one in my opinion being the ability to import and export directly from iDisk, or any WebDAV-supported virtual disk. Dropbox isn’t WebDAV, unfortunately, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for Dropbox support.

Until now, Pages was the only one of the three apps that could export to its MS Office counterpart, but now, all three can export to Office-compatible formats. I’m curious to see how well this will work with Keynote, since most Keynote files I’ve exported to PowerPoint look like they were victims of a vicious assault.

The apps now support grouped objects as well. For Keynote especially, this is a big plus for me, as you can define builds on grouped objects, and the groups remain intact when imported from the desktop version.

A small, but welcome change is support for importing .txt and .csv files for Pages and Numbers, respectively. You can’t export them, but at least you can work with them. These are all supported via the “Open As” command, so any app can inbound the files.

Pages gets another halfway-done feature with support for footnotes, endnotes, and sections on import and export. You can’t create these, but files you copy onto the iPad to work with won’t get mangled as part of the process. I’m hoping 1.3 allows users to create them.

I’ve always believed the feature set of the iWork suite was the best available for the iPad. The sticking issue for me was transfers. With the 1.2 update, I feel Apple has made some serious progress towards creating a fantastic productivity suite. So far, the only thing I can say is missing from Pages is creation of footnotes.

I also think Apple needs to address importing fonts since I use non-standard fonts for all my presentations. Now, with iDisk support I hope Apple also fixes general syncing issues, since it looks like I’ll be storing more mission-critical data up there in the cloud.

Full release notes for Numbers, Pages, and Keynote can be read via the App Store.

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