The great thing about #1 is that if Apple really did leave money on the table here, any third-party developer can collect it. Just put a Mac with two versions of keynote behind a REST endpoint and charge a buck or two per conversion. If you can turn a profit at that, not only do you get the smug satisfaction of clearly winning an internet argument, but also there's a cash prize.
If, however, that sounds like a waste of a perfectly good weekend, an economic bet that is unlikely to pay off, it would be an equal waste of a weekend for an Apple engineer. Apple is not a charity; they are a business that takes calculated risks, and they didn't like this one. Did they miscalculate? If you think so, there is no reason not to fill the gap yourself.
It's ridiculous that you cannot open the previous version of a Pages file in the current version of Pages! What an absolute joke.
Did OP delete those old versions? I don't see what the problem is here.
He got a new machine.
I would not mind buying a floppy drive and all necessary adapters, install Atari ST emulator and write Kamenicky encoding converter in Python to convert 1st World Plus documents from '89 if I had to convert documents of my parents. I would not be complaining about obsolescence of the format at all.
My problem is not technical, it is about user experience and productivity.
1994 -- switch from Motorola to PowerPC.
2006 -- switch from PowerPC to Intel
Can I build a flappy bird clone? Sure. Should I? Hell no. I have more profitable projects to work on given a fixed amount of time and resources.
If you think this is money left on the table, then build the 'small utility' to convert the format yourself. If you make money, huzzah, you were right. If you don't, then you were wrong, and this is a niche use case that isn't worth the investment.
That would violate the Keynote license agreement. So, we're back to needing Apple to help out here.
edit: from Section 2A, Permitted License Uses and Restrictions... i) to download, install, use and run for personal, non-commercial use, one (1) copy of the Apple Software directly on each Apple-branded computer running OS X (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control; and (ii) if you are a commercial enterprise or educational institution, to download, install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software for use either: (a) by a single individual on each of the Mac Computer(s) that you own or control, or (b) by multiple individuals on a single shared Mac Computer that you own or control. For example, a single employee may use the Apple Software on both the employee’s desktop Mac Computer and laptop Mac Computer, or multiple students may serially use the Apple Software on a single Mac Computer located at a resource center or library.
Doesn't that cover the suggested use?
Except, right now, it doesn't. If that was their primary design goal, than it has not been achieved, because their web version still lacks features that are front and center on the desktop. So, you can't use that as an excuse.
They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.
I can keep up with my system and applications just fine, but are you saying that I have to re-visit my archive of past documents with each new keynote version, and re-open & re-save them all?
It doesn't even degrade gracefully. Pages tosses out a lot of formatting and embedded media from earlier documents, which has pushed us to eliminate iWork from our 'productivity' apps.
Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one severe security flaw that iOS 5 did not have. In short, there appears to be no rational reason we would "upgrade" this device as we are repeatedly prompted to do.
Recently, Apple appears to have changed the rules for app developers so new things going into the app store have to aim primarily at iOS 7. At some point we upgraded an app we'd bought a while ago to get some much-plugged new feature that someone thought was interesting. Aside from the fact that the new feature itself turned out to be paywalled anyway, so the upgrade invitation for the app was basically just spam abusing the app store mechanism, the "upgraded" app also had a horribly glitchy UI where previously it had been smooth as silk drawing exactly the same screens.
Can we "downgrade" that app back to something that works, which we already had before, via the app store or otherwise? No, it doesn't seem so.
If we "upgraded" iOS itself, as suggested to fix the app (though we've seen no reports that doing so does in fact fix this app), could we then "downgrade" again if we didn't like it? Also no, as far as we can tell.
As it happens, we need to have Apple devices around for testing our web stuff, so we're stuck with spending some of our company money on new gear now and then for as long as our customers are doing the same, and we're stuck with using more recent versions of iOS on some devices for the same reason. But at this point, nothing would ever convince me to spend my own money on an iSomething. I was always suspicious of the lock-in and kindergarten UI, and seeing it in action, the results are at least as bad as I expected.
What is possibly more interesting is that it seems average users are getting fed up as well. Not so long ago, mobile visits to a site I run that isn't particularly geek-related were utterly dominated by iOS devices. Today, while iOS still represents a clear majority, it is a much closer balance between iOS and Android, and the trend is strongly in the latter's direction. I can't help wondering whether this is people who've now been not-upgraded to more recent versions one time too many, or who've been forced to dump expensive and otherwise working hardware for artificial software reasons, starting to vote with their wallets.
As far as development and having to spend money on hardware, though, I'd say Android is far worse than Apple in that regard. Android still has nearly half of devices running 2.x and the screen sizes are all over the map. We write and support native apps for both Apple and Android and we have far more Android devices laying around for testing than we do Apple devices.
I think it is deeply regrettable that certain parts of the industry have moved in that direction, and Android is a fine example (as is almost anything else Google makes). That said, it's still preferable to Apple, who move fast, break stuff, and then won't even let you fix it by moving back again.
Yes, if you plan ahead. Keep the .ipa files, those can be loaded onto the phone via iTunes.
If you've upgraded iOS, you can also downgrade that. It's a pain, you need to get the .ipsw file and store some sort of activation code.
Is this more or less of a pain than on the desktop? Well, if you want to downgrade an app on the desktop, you'll need to keep the old installer around. Same thing with an OS, you'll need to wipe and reinstall everything from the old OS installer.
It's more unexpected on iOS, because generally you never need to deal with installers, but I don't think it's more painful. It's just more painful by contrast, since upgrading is so nice on iOS.
Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.
I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?
Also worth pointing out it's much easier to display old formats than it is to make them editable.
IMG tags with unquoted SRC attributes, and unquoted ALIGN attribute
BASE tag with default attribute - tag is: <base="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/"> but should be <base href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">
UL tags with no LI tags
So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.
It's a good thing that webpage didn't use the <blink> element.
A counter argument to that, is I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where parsing an HTML document takes over 1,000,000 lines of unparallelizable C. You are sweeping a huge requirement that makes the rendering of that page possible in 2014. Ultimately it takes software to render that information, and the software that does render that, may have an expiration date.
How about if we're talking a blog I wrote 20 years ago, vs. some really nice improvement in modern software?
Backwards compatibility is great, and ideally no data would ever be lost to bitrot, but backwards compatibility always has a cost. I'm not unilaterally willing to pay that cost.
Is it really so difficult to just not break a feature that was present in the last version of the software?
At worst (like in the case of iWork 13 which probably is completely new code), you get one programmer to spend a few days writing a converter which reuses most of the old code.
This is not a useful statement. If you convert the "should" to a "shall", and try to design a system around that requirement alone, it would prove very hard. Even designing a clock around that requirement is very hard (http://longnow.org/clock/).
If you back off from the "shall", then you are in the standard world of engineering tradeoffs, which is where you started.
What features do you want to give up for "eternal"?
I'm the developer who build their related Long Bets project (http://longbets.org/) and I think "data should be eternal" is a perfectly reasonable standard. That was certainly my goal in designing Long Bets.
If you start with that as a principle, I don't think it imposes particularly large engineering burdens, especially if you accept some potential degradation as a consequence.
For example here, instead of a "fuck you" dialog box, they could have imported the core of a presentation: text and images positioned on a sequence of frames.
An analogy is HTML. It's basically zero engineering effort to just suck the text out of a page. It is only modestly more effort to pull out some of the semantic markup, like headings, lists, and emphasis. And that's the part that really hurts to lose, not which precise shade of blue you used in your footer text.
This can be said for all sorts of things, from the Commodore 64 to Keynote. If you want to be able to access the data on an NES cartridge you are going to need special hardware and software. Yes the ROMS are available now online, but that's only because someone with the hardware and software made it available to others.
This is the nature of proprietary formats.
Indeed. When you choose to save your work in a not-public format, you are decidîng not to care about its lifespan: complaining later is just useless, unfortunately.
A better option is to stick to open standards. If your presentation is done in something like HTML, there is a 100% chance you will be able to view it in even 50 years as it is standardized and there are many implementations available for viewing it.
Of course, if your presentation depends on some javascript calculations or a remotely hosted jquery, those probably won't be working in 50 years time either..
something poetic about that...
The fact they canceled silverlight and won't make a new version, doesn't have much to do with backwards compatibility.
It seems to me you can do pretty much anything whilst having a small set of conversion scripts to get the old data into your preferred new format.
Its not "big data", not streaming data, not rocket science.
Absolutely. One is for customers who don't want to lose any file or data. The other is for those who don't mind losing old stuff, no matter how important it may be. Now that's bold and innovative.
Apple, on the other hand is almost the opposite. They're obsessive about upgrading everyone and leaving the past behind. That's great because they're free to make bold and innovative changes. The downside of course is that you and your files sometimes get left behind.
Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers. If you feel like backwards compatibility is a really important feature then whether you want to admit it or not, you probably would be happy as a Microsoft customer.