iWork secret life as ZIP file revealed, includes PDF preview

"Why not just use office and save yourself...hassle?"

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PDF preview is only present within .pages files.
.numbers and .keynote only have .png files als previews. Very poor definition (to use as an icon preview) and not containing all sheets or slides.
So I don't think this is such a revelation. I only see it useful for pages files...

I'll have to wait for that iWork viewer to effortlessly make my Windows friends covet.
Don't have too much hope though...

Yeah, it's no embarrassment and no news: Open Office and the new MS Office formats already do it, and surely many Mac users must have already known.

Here is one curious thing, though. AFAIK, Apple has not registered a MIME-type for any iWork documents. Not here, are they?

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/

I haven't got iWork 09 - still using 08. However, I believe if you attach an IWork document - such as a Pages word-processing document - to an email, it can't be given the right MIME-type .... because there isn't one. Therefore, Mail.app gives it the MIME-type application/zip.

Now that's ridiculous and is likely to give cause problems at the other end, since the recipient's mail program is unlikely to be able to determine the correct helper-application without a MIME-type to go by.

This is useful to me because with all my documents stored on my iDisk, I can edit a file on a Windows PC at school without needing my laptop...

Keynote does a better job with graphics as compared to PowerPoint. If one uses LaTeX to create an equation--a far better way than using Equation Editor in Office--one can output a PDF that works beautifully in Keynote. It looks terrible in PowerPoint. Also, PowerPoint files get messed-up ("corrupted" ?) and are then useless. iWork files are always accessible as they do not exist as binaries. One could go on and on. In the end, I stopped trying to figure out how to make PowerPoint work for me. I use Keynote and when I need to send someone a PP version, I export it. Has always worked better for me this way.

Perhaps Office 2008 (or 2007 on Windows) has fixed some of these issues but after iWork came out and I started to use it, I have rarely looked back.

Here's what I think is a real use of this feature:

I use Keynote a lot, but I don't know of a way to edit images that I have included in my presentation with an external program, such as Photoshop. By unzipping the Keynote document it becomes possible to retrieve and of the images included in the presentation, edit it with any application that is right for the task, save in the same place (w/o changing the name), and zip back the folder. Next time the presentation is opened in Keynote, the changes will be there. I just tried it.

Of course, this is a rather annoying procedure, if anyone has a simpler way, I'd be happy to hear about it.

Dani

...because iWork does many things better than Office.

Very old story...

This trick also works with Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) and OpenOffice.org (.odt) documents. They even include a preview, but not in pdf format (maybe as a png thumbnail).

This file structure isn't anything out of the ordinary. Microsoft Office (as of 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac) files are also .zip archives containing XML data. I believe that Open Office.org files are also built the same way.

Isn't new? Yeah, it's the ISO document standard. See ODF.
ODF files are zips as well...