Just yesterday Pieter Omvlee asked on twitter if anyone used iWork.com, implying that Apple had forgotten about it. Almost everyone agreed that iWork.com has been less than a hobby for Apple and they hadn’t done anything with it since its release at Macworld ’09. A little over 9 months later, Apple has pushed some important updates to their ‘so far feature deficit’ web service.

The biggest change, is the ability to view all your documents in a grid view with sorting options, giving you a much better view of your files. Second, is comment notification, which will notify you at your preferred interval if any new comments come through on your documents. Again, nifty feature, but not a lot to talk about. And third, is 128-bit AES security, which can be used to add a password to a shared document.

I think the question still remains. Has Apple abandoned iWork.com? Google and Microsoft are pushing hard for the online office, but Apple’s offering seems nowhere near usable on a day to day basis. Sure it serves its intended purpose of ‘merely sharing documents’, but we need more than that. I think the grid view is one step in the right direction, but there needs to be better integration with the desktop versions of iWork with the online service.

What I’d like to see is some kind of Webkit view within the three iWork apps that lists out online documents. There should also be a seamless way of dropping documents in your online ‘bucket’. That would really remove the bounds of ‘which desktop’ while still keeping the richness of a desktop client. Second, some integration with MobileMe would be great. There’s no point in keeping iWork as something separate of MobileMe. Rather bring the suite together so they work with each other. Third, more updates, more frequently.

I have used iWork.com on several occasions to share documents (mostly to ‘wow’ PC users) and it has worked out well. Have you been using iWork.com for any document sharing (besides just trying it out)?