iWork '09: Long Distance Voyager
One of the questions we get most frequently these days is whether or not these "old '08/'09 Themes" we produce continue to work in the latest + greatest versions of Keynote or Pages. It's a reasonable question - particularly if you're new to the applications via the Mac App Store, where no mention is made of the Suite name these days, let alone the Year that once signified the major edition of the suite. We've found folks to be genuinely surprised to realize they're running what amounts to a five-year-old app, and that those "old" themes are still very much current.
Yet here we are, some five full years after the last major-version release of the latest iWork suite. That's not to say that things have remained the same, by any means - Keynote, Pages and Numbers are now available individually, on multiple platforms/devices, and now have moved into Beta for cross-platform cloud functionality. The changes have been subtle along the way, and while the desktop apps have grown long in the tooth in a lot of ways over the intervening years, they're remained reliably stable through three major OS iterations (more, if you include iOS), and have added the necessary features and functionality to enable the suite to keep pace with itself on those multiple fronts at each step.
There have been plenty of rumors, these last couple of years in particular, that we'd see a new major-version release any time now - most recently Apple themselves, if you read their iWork for iCloud statements from this year's WWDC in a particular (generous) light. But it remains to be seen exactly when we'll see any major core changes for the productivity apps beyond their already-engaged transitions to mobile devices and the cloud. Until Apple unveil a new major-version release it remains firmly in the realm of rumor and speculation, and we don't especially like to engage in either.
We adopted the Year-based nomenclature for updates on our theme library in 2005/2006 during the iWork '06 transition, thinking it would help to dispel any confusion as to which version of the application was required for a particular theme. And that worked wonderfully for a while - making it easy for us to iterate the theme library right alongside iWork's updates when we needed to, particularly during the '08 transition when the theme model architecture changed radically between versions and we needed to overhaul nearly the entire library.
But in 2013, five years after that last major-version release, when Apple themselves are no longer referring to the apps by Year (outside of the About box in the apps), the logic of continuing on that path seems highly questionable. Just a couple of years back, when we updated our Platform themes to the '09 architecture as Platform '09, we received more than a few emails wondering why we were building for an older app, from people reasonably assuming it was (then) 2011 and we'd certainly moved on to the (imagined) latest version by now. That sense has only multiplied since then, judging by the emails we continue to get to this day about these "old '08/'09 themes" of ours.
We've been holding off on any major-version iterations of our themes since Platform '09, hoping those "any day now" rumors about an updated iWork would eventually bear fruit and we'd be able to roll each of our house styles forward right alongside sans confusion. But at some point we're going to need to update our library whether Apple's moved forward or not - what's long in the tooth for a productivity application is almost doubly so for the theme designs used in them. Our build standards evolve, our tastes change and grow, and our themes should continue moving right along with them regardless. Application stability's great to a point, but at another point it also becomes a bit of a cage.
We're not entirely sure what's coming next for naming as of yet - save the upcoming anniversary reboot of one of our most well-known themes. And Apple may yet surprise us with a whole new generation of the iWork apps in the coming months, with a new naming nomenclature of their own that we'd be hard-pressed not to at least consider adopting.
In the meanwhile, know that it's (very) duly noted, and we're actively evaluating how we'll handle major-version updates moving forward with as little confusion as possible, regardless of whether iWork '09 continues on this long voyage into the years or not.
