in-between thing: microsoft office app for ipad

Last night, a mere day after writing up Mobile Thing #6,  I learned that Microsoft is releasing a version of Office for the iPad, which was confirmed this morning: Microsoft to Offer Office for iPad, Maybe a Bit Late. At first I was relieved that I wouldn't have to see if CloudOn fixes its problems. What better to play with Office than Office itself? Then I saw the catch: read all the documents you want for free, but if you want to make any, you'll have to subscribe to Office 365: $100/year.

You know how I said I'd given up on accessing Office documents on my iPad? You can still consider it given up.

23 Mobile Things #6: Creating & Editing Docs

I'd pretty much given up on the idea of ever working with Microsoft Office programs on my iPad. Even when "tablet" meant "iPad," Microsoft didn't make Office tablet-friendly. Now there are Android and Windows tablets out there as well, and the few rumors I'd ever heard that there was going to be an Office suite of apps for iOS have died. But the end result is that I don't use Office nearly as much as I used to personally. I still use it at work, yes, but that might have a lot to do with the fact that we hardly use tablets or smartphones for work at my library.

I decided to try CloudOn. I loaded it onto the iPad weeks ago, and then promptly ignored it. Remember how I said I barely use Office anymore? I didn't need to write anything, so I had nothing to test CloudOn with! But I finally sat down and created a document and can now report my findings.

Good

If you can use Microsoft Word—and why would you be doing this if you couldn't?—you can use CloudOn. The app's mini-tour when you first log in was enough to get going. The app emulated Word successfully: not as visually attractive as Word itself is, but everything was clearly labeled and was where I expected it to be. The app saved my test document to Dropbox without a hitch, and I was then able to pull it up in Word itself without error messages or mangled text.

Bad

The lag was maddening. Type a few words rapidly, look up, and realize that none of them have appeared on the screen. Wait...wait...there they are! Resume typing. Wait again. GAH! This is why I don't use Google Docs; it has the same infuriating delay between keystroke and letter appearance. I watch the screen as I compose, and if the words don't show up, I lose track of what I'm typing.

The second problem was a glitch. I'm guessing there's a conflict in the app somewhere between what's pretending to be Word's spell-checker and Auto-correct. (I have this same issue when I try to email stuff from Twitterrific through the iOS mail app.) What happened was that whenever a possibly misspelled word popped up, the first letter or two of the correction would be duplicated. For instance, when it tried to replace something I'd typed with "things," what appeared on the screen was "tthings." What excellent motivation to never, ever mistype a word! Because if you do, and this glitch happens, and you have to go back and manually correct the error…

…the third problem kicks in. You know how to move the cursor in iOS, you touch the screen where you want it to move to? And if you're slightly off, you roll your finger a bit to one side or the other to reposition the cursor? Well, that signals to CloudOn that you want the Word feature where you highlight something and a box with the most common formatting options appears. Which it did. Which meant that I couldn't see the cursor to see if it was in the right place for me to backspace and erase the offending duplicated letters. GAH!²

All in all

This is an app with potential. It's got some problems, but fix them, and this app will come in handy. Like I said, we still use Microsoft Office at work, and if I found myself away from work but needing to access our documents and spreadsheets, this would do a good job. At this point, I'll probably still compose simple documents in Evernote if I have to, but fix those glitches, and this will give Evernote some good competition.

23 Mobile Things #5: Notetaking

This Thing was the first I'd heard of Springpad, although a quick peek around the web shows that it's got a devoted following. Almost every article I found about it mentioned Evernote as well, confirming my suspicion that there's a lot of overlap between the two. Lifehacker swears that the two services are growing apart and that some of their staff use both, but in different ways. I am not yet convinced. Or rather, yes, I get that they're not identical. I just don't see that Springpad does enough differently than Evernote that you would need to have one if you already had the other.

Springpad and I got off to an awkward start. I set up my account on my desktop computer and managed to forget the password by the time I got to the iPad to sync the app. No problem: I'll just reset the password, right? Wrong. The app had a "Forgot your password?" link, but when I clicked it, the display just sort of slid to the lower right, partly vanished, and didn't do a thing about letting me in. I had to wait until I could get back to a desktop computer to fix it. And as it turns out, you have to have access to a desktop computer to reset it even if the app is working; you're not allowed to reset it from the app. A security measure, I suppose, but it feels clunky. How will this work for people who don't have ready access to a desktop?

Once I got in, things were much more fun. I think Springpad is more welcoming than Evernote was. Having categories like Books or Movies gave me ideas about what to start saving. It took me months to get into Evernote (a common experience) because I couldn't figure out where to start. But those same categories feel a bit limiting as well. I see I can make up my own notebooks outside of the categories, but it's not as obvious. Springpad has more visual appeal than Evernote. It's not entirely an Evernote wannabe, I've decided—more like the love child of Evernote and Pinterest. And the bit where you can follow other people's notes adds a dash of Delicious. I can see the appeal of looking though other people's notes, although I balk at letting them see mine. Lifehacker says you can "use Springpad as your new personal assistant." I'm resisting giggling at this: my iPad already has Google Now on it, trying to be a personal assistant, and if I had a more modern iPad, I'd have Siri as well. My iPhone is modern enough to support all three of them. How many artificial personal assistants does one person need, anyway?

Despite it being a "notetaking" app, I don't think Springpad is as good at letting you create your own content (like taking notes during a presentation) as Evernote. It seems more oriented towards saving things you find online as well as finding related online things that you might like to know about as well. I may need to come up with a project of some sort to test that out thoroughly. Evernote is certainly meant to save things, but I don't see it as a finding tool. I'm going to keep Springpad on my various devices for the time being because it's going to take a few months to really get a feel for it. Based on what I've done with it so far, I think it would be good for people who find Evernote more than they need (or want to deal with). It looks like its forte would be in researching for personal projects. For a professional project or complicated personal project, I would be more likely to recommend Evernote.

23 Mobile Things #4: Keeping Up

I first encountered Zite back in those dark days when we learned that Google Reader was shutting down and that we'd need to find other ways to read our RSS feeds. As Google Reader had done pretty much everything I'd needed an RSS reader to do, I wasn't thrilled. It's one thing to go off and explore new apps in a spirit of curiosity, quite another to be forced to find an adequate substitute for something you were satisfied with. So admittedly, I wasn't in the best frame of mind when I tested Zite back then, and it wasn't the one I settled on. Instead, I chose Feedly, which went and redesigned itself to be more like Google Reader, incorporating the features I'd liked about Google Reader.

But time has passed, and if I was no longer feeling pressured to move to Zite, maybe I'd like it more. Perhaps they'd added something I'd like; apps are always being redesigned. Plus, it made sense to continue working with something I had some familiarity with rather than install still yet another app for this Thing. This time around, I've decided that even though Zite does have some good features, it's not enough to persuade me to switch.

One of Zite's strengths is its system for finding new reading material based on what you liked and didn't like of what you've already read. You vote on stories, mark topics as favorites: it was simple to figure out and intuitive to do. I want to make it clear that I think that's a great feature, just not what I personally am looking for in an RSS reader at this time. I already have a number of blogs and other sources that I follow, and I'm so far behind on reading them that I will never catch up (ack!). On top of that, friends and strangers are constantly posting interesting articles to Facebook and Twitter. I can't keep up with all that—I don't want my RSS reader finding even more stuff for me to fall behind on! (Feedly has this feature as well. It's not as easy to use, as I recall, but since I don't use it, that's not a problem.)

And then there's the magazine-style layout: "You'll get all the benefit of our powerful technology wrapped in a beautiful design that is a joy to pick up every day." I'm sure many people love it, but I find it a chaotic mess, and it mostly leaves me wanting to shut the app down rather than read anything. Feedly also has a magazine layout—that's probably the default—but it wasn't difficult to switch it to a list of article titles, grouped by the categories I chose. If there's a way to do that in Zite, easy or hard, I have yet to find it. I like Feedly's mass deletion feature, where I can swipe and mark an entire page as read. Or I can just swipe over individual stories, leaving others for later. And Feedly syncs with a website I can access from my desktop computer, for those times when I have a few minutes to read at my desk. Not Zite.

Which sums up my feelings overall: not Zite. Blog post written, I'm off to delete it from my iPad. Again.