Overhaul of iLife and iWork May be on the Horizon

Clues have been appearing in recent days that indicate Apple may be overhauling their iWork and iLife suites in the near future. Job postings for positions in both the iLife and iWork team have appeared on the company’s web site.

MacRumors:

Late last week, Apple Bitch noticed two new job listings for senior software engineers for the company’s iLife team, with the descriptions emphasizing a desire to “re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work”. MacNN followed up with its own reporting pointing to a number of other job postings for both the iLife and iWork teams suggesting that Apple is making significant additions to its teams. 

The recently added job postings explicitly reference the iLife team or the application suite itself. The postings include openings for an engineer in the iLife Frameworks QA department; a QA engineer to help test new features in iPhoto; a Senior User Interface Designer for iWork, and two Senior Software Engineer positions that reference working on the user interface of iLife.

Apple’s iWork productivity suite, a competitor to Microsoft’s “Office” suite, last received minor updates in December. The last major update was four years ago.

iLife, Apple’s consumer applications suite (iPhoto, GarageBand and iMovie) saw its last major update in October 2010.

Apple has also recently acquired 18 patents addressing information management from Maya-Systems. These include a file sorting system that can reorganize according to time, category, or a common theme, and sync with cloud servers and other users.

While the new hirings and patent acquisitions may point to a major revamp of iWork and iLife, such new hires are generally done early in the development cycle, so it may be some time before the revamped apps are ready for public consumption.

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