It's been almost 17 months to the day since Apple last made significant (paid) updates to their flagship iWork productivity suite, but the company has announced that iWork 09 is now available.

All three iWork applications have seen updates, and Apple has also announced an iWork.com Public Beta allowing users to view and comment on iWork documents.

Among the changes to the desktop applications, Keynote allows you to animate objects automatically, whilst the Smart Move option allows you to slickly animate objects between slides. Pages, the iWork word processor, now ships with a built in 'Full Screen' mode for full-focus writing, and outline mode for project organization. There's also another 40 templates for your documents in this new version. The Numbers spreadsheet application allows you to categorize data far more quickly than in previous versions, includes an enhanced function browser and a formula list to quickly jump around your documents.

iWork '09 is available for $79 from the Apple Store.