On July the 23rd, I published an article about the future of Apple Works. I see that our friends at ThinkSecret.com agree with some things I said in that article, like the MS Office transparent compatibility feature.

Since Nick de Plume's very interesting article that I suggest you to read (Think Secret), one of the sources that had contacted me two months ago, emailed me again to confirm once more that Apple is developing two new versions of Apple Works. The first will be a paid for or bundled integrated program like Apple Works 6, and the second one will probably be an iApp and will be free but–as you might have guessed–will only have some basic features (although it will preserve a general compatibility with basic Office documents). One source even describes Apple Works 7 as the "replacement" for MS Office. I guess what he means is that it will have as many features as Office does.

According to another reliable source, the new version of Apple Works will not only bring compatibility with MS Office, but some huge changes in the interface too. It will also bring integration with other Mac OS X applications like Address Book.

The paid version of Apple Works will be released during the first half of 2003 and the iApp version will either come with Panther (as a new feature, like iChat was for Jaguar) or it will be released later, near the end of the year. As I usually say, it's really not easy to speculate on a release date for some software, because that depends on the level of human resources Apple sets for it's development.

I hope I'll soon have some screenshots of Apple Works in action. You can be sure that I'll immediately post them here. If you're one of the rare developers that is, or will be testing one of these rare builds, please think about sending me some cool screenshots or any exclusive information here.