I downloaded the iWork ’08 trial yesterday just to have a play around and have been very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Certainly the new contextual format bar saves a lot of time switching between the tabs in the inspector. They’ve also added a whole load of useful little features like Proofreading (a taste of what’s to come with Leopard’s system-wide grammar checker?) and – finally – the ability to count the number of words in a selection rather than the whole document.

With under 3 months to go until Leopard’s launch, I thought I’d have a dig around in the application bundles to see how all these icons were being stored and, to my surprise, Apple’s still using TIFFs for everything:

Since it’s been 20 months in the making, I was expecting Apple to be leading the way with resolution independence. I thought these apps would be brimming with PDF-based resources (or even with buttons drawn using CoreGraphics) and 512×512 icons ready for Leopard, but apparently not. Perhaps we’ll see a resolution-independent-ready update before the year’s out…

Also, incidentally and a little bizarrely, there are 3 movies in the Numbers ’08 bundle promoting what’s new in iMovie ’08. Wonder how those get there!