Attention all you users of iWork.com, Apple would like to remind you that the service’s days are numbered. As of July 31, Apple will turn off iWork.com for good, and any documents you have stored there will be deconstructed into their component electrons.
For those users who have ignored Apple’s previous warnings, there’s still time to rescue your documents. Apple suggests you log in to the service and download all your documents to your computer.
iWork.com was first announced in 2009 as a place for users to store and share their iWork documents. In a rare move, Apple released it as a public beta—a stage it never managed to exit before its, er, timely demise. While iWork.com was seen by many as a beachhead against Google Docs, the service lacked several of its competitor’s most useful features, including collaborative editing.
Going forward, iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature provides similar functionality to iWork.com, albeit with a simpler workflow. Rather than having to explicitly share your documents to iWork.com, you can just save your documents to iCloud where they will be available to both the iOS and Mac versions of iWork. While Documents in the Cloud has been available in the iOS versions of iWork since iOS 5, it’s due to come to the Mac with Mountain Lion’s release this month.
