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.

I think it is time we in the software industry step up to the plate and offer our help. With what we know about artificial intelligence (AI), genetic algorithms, and natural-language parsing, it should be possible to develop a software program where TV scripts are created based on previous episodes.

What we need are:

• Characters in the series and their attributes (gender, personality, etc.)
• Tons of previous scripts
• The series formula, e.g. The new clue to solve the case between minutes 39 and 40 in Law & Order, or CSI.
• A genetic algorithm that learns the characteristic of the series through all the existing episodes, e.g. how each character behaves, their favorite catchphrases, and how the general plot line evolves. For many shows, just the catchphrase would suffice.
  
• A software bot to trawl the net for bizarre news as seed to generate new stories.

The scripts generated by this AI program would probably not very good at first -- but hey, neither was Seinfeld -- they might not make sense at all. But, after some teaching sessions by a human -- perhaps volunteers from the audience? It's all about crowd-sourcing these days, right? -- some reasonable scripts should result.

Granted this strategy would not work for proper drama like 24, Dexter, Weeds, etc. which all have major story arcs running through entire seasons but, it should work great for formulaic shows such as Law & Order, CSI, Numbers, Psych, where almost everything stays the same from episode to episode with only minor plot device differences in between.

How much effort would it take to develop this AI program? I don't have the faintest idea. I just suggest stuff, it's up to other people to handle the sticky details of implementation. I can imagine modifying an existing AI algorithm to accept TV scripts instead of whatever scientific research data, let it run on some beefy servers (may be run it as adistributed project like SETI@home? New TV shows are at least as important as finding aliens, maybe moreso.), and see what comes out at the other end.

Remember, this idea is hardly new. It has already been done with financial news by Thomson Financial as reported by Wired back in 2006. Is it such a big leap from news to formulaic drama?

Come on, doesn't this sound like a fantastic final year college project? Surely the prospect of getting your final assignment done and being the hero who breaks the Writer's Strike deadlock sounds appealing to someone?

More interesting question is: Which one is smarter? Law & Order, or an artificial intelligence program? With Fred Thompson dropping out of the presidential race, our money is on the AI.

Hot on the heels of today's new iLife suite, iWork '08 comes to the table too. Whilst new Keynote, and Pages, features are expected, the most hotly tipped question was "Would Apple bring out an Excel rival"? Behold Numbers and so much more.

You know those numbers that could change the world? No, not the ones on Lost, the HD-DVD key code that could lead to the end of Digg as we know it.

Well, the sixteen hexadecimal digits are just numbers when it comes right down to it. And you can do all sorts of things with numbers, like use them as a basis for web-colors and make them into a pretty picture that may or may not be illegal to share with your friends.

But why stop there when you can go one step further and design a T-shirt based on those colors and sell it for fun and profit? It'll be interesting to see if the T-shirt gets a cease and desist notice from the MPAA, or if they'll send out letters to anyone caught wearing the shirt in public.

[via Boing Boing]