Last week was fairly slow and this week there were more interesting events.
Financial Times reports that Google Chromebooks became more popular in US schools than iPads. The difference is not big: 715,500 Chromebooks versus 702,000 iPads in Q3 2014 – but the fact remains. Attractive price and ever-increasing functionality make Chromebooks a good choice for classroom. With rollApp many of the useful applications for education are now available in the cloud for Chromebook users.
Google announced a new feature in Gmail – ability toeditMicrosoft Office documents attachments with Google Docs. It will also be possible to edit Office files without converting them to Google Docs with a Chrome extension. If you need to do some advanced editing of your office documents you can always use OpenOffice or LibreOffice on rollApp.
Lukas Blakk, Mozilla release manager, in posted in his twitter, “We need to be where our users are so we’re going to get Firefox on iOS”. It’s unclear how Mozilla plans to bring its Firefox browser to iOS, because Apple doesn’t allow third-party browser engines to be used in iOS applications. Even Google Chrome for iOS uses Apple’s engine for rendering the web pages. We’ll see if and how Mozilla will be able to get its browser onto Apple’s mobile platform.
That’s all for this week, see you next weekend. And don’t forget to follow us in Twitter,Facebookand Google+.
At rollApp we are continually expanding the collection of apps available to you in our cloud. Check out some of the other apps we’ve added recently. You can find these and many other apps at www.rollapp.com/apps.
PDF Mod is a simple tool for modifying PDF documents. It can rotate, extract, remove and reorder pages via drag and drop. You can also add/edit the title, subject, author and keywords of a PDF document using PDF Mod. Multiple documents may be combined via drag and drop.
Xmind is a powerful creative tool that makes it simple to gather, analyze and share your ideas with others. It’s one of the most popular mind mapping tools. XMind has simple and intuitive interface that makes you focused only on what really matters — your ideas. XMind supports exporting to a lot of formats such as Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, PNG, JPEG, and other.
SOFA — Statistics Open For All — is a user-friendly statistics, analysis, & reporting program. SOFA lets you display results in an attractive format ready to share, make charts, produce attractive report tables, perform a range of basic statistical tests.
GnuCash is a personal and small-business financial-accounting software. GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. It has double-entry bookkeeping, scheduled transactions, mortgage and loan repayment assistant, small business accounting features, multi-currency transaction handling, and other features.
SOFA is an Open Source framework primarily targeted at real-time simulation, with an emphasis on medical simulation. It is mostly intended for the research community to help develop newer algorithms, but can also be used as an efficient prototyping tool.
Welcome to our weekly digest! Happy Thanksgiving! Lets recap what was in the news recently.
Jolla Tablet — world’s first crowd-sourced tablet. Jolla’s Indiegogo campaign exceed everyone expectations. They tripled their original $380,000 goal in a few days. Jolla team has announced that it’s adding new campaign goals including the option of built-in 3.5G data capability. The device will come with its own operating system, Sailfish OS. Sailfish OS has user interface controlled solely by touch and gestures. Besides running its own native apps, Sailfish OS allows to install and run Android apps.
Google has released improved the security features in Google for Work. In The Devices and Activity dashboard you can find information about the devices accessing your Google account, including devices that were active in the last 28 days as well as those which are currently signed in. This is a welcome addition as it allows users to proactively manage security of their account.
European Parliament votes to ask for Google to be broken up. The measure passed by a symbolic vote and does not carry any legal weight, but it highlights that the search giant with 90 percent marketshare for search in Europe is under close attention from regulating authorities. But experts believe that Google won’t be broken up and lay some reasons why.
Traditionally, office applications are among the most popular on rollApp. We now have users, who use LibreOffice or OpenOffice to create and edit their documents, from nearly every country in the world. There has been a number of requests to make localized versions of the office apps available on rollApp. We are happy to report that with a recent update, in addition to English, Spanish and Russian, you can now can have office apps talking to you in Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Polish and Turkish!
Here is how you change the user interface language in LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Go to menu Tools > Options > Language (in Language settings section) and select the desired language for the UI and documents from the respective dropdowns:
You would then need to restart the application for the new language settings to take effect. By the way, the correct way to close an application is through File > Exit menu. This will ensure that if you have any unsaved changes, you’ll have a chance to save your files.
Another popular request was asking for additional fonts for our cloud applications. Good news! We’ve added 27 new serif, sans serif and handwritten fonts. These fonts are now available in LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Inkscape and will eventually become available in all the other apps in our collection.
If you are on the market for a new inexpensive laptop, you definitely should take a look at Chromebooks. There is a great review on the Verge, which will help you navigate the world modern-generation devices powered by Chrome OS.
Long time there was no news from Nokia. But this week they surprised us. Nokia came out with it’s first tablet based on Android – Nokia N1. This 7.9-inch device comes Android 5.0 Lollipop that runs Nokia’s new Z Launcher (you can also try it on other Android devices too). Check out the reviews that compare Nokia’s tablet with other popular browsers: Nexus 9 by HTC or iPad mini from Apple. Some say Nokia N1 is nice alternative to current Android tablets, others say it closely resembles Apple’s iPad Mini (some even say too closely). It still remains to be seen how well the new device will perform on the market.
Microsoft announced Sway – a new application that allows to easily create and share a polished, interactive, web-based canvas of your ideas with family, friends, teachers, and coworkers. “Sway shows you the stuff you have stored in the cloud: just tap or click, drag, and drop it right onto your canvas”, – they say in the announcement. The app will allow to add content from OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and your device. Currently it is available by invitation only.
Google released Chrome 39 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This release is an important milestone for Mac users as it finally brings 64-bit build of the browser to this platform. As usually, new release packs lots of security fixes, a number of new apps/extension APIs, and lots of under the hood changes for stability and performance. Also, Chrome 39 brings a slew of new features for developers.
Mozilla makes Yahoo the default Firefox search engine in the U.S. In Russia it uses Yandex, and Baidu in China.Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia will continue to be built-in as alternative search engine options. Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004, and Google will continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features in Firefox.
Lukas Blakk, Mozilla release manager, in posted in his twitter, “We need to be where our users are so we’re going to get Firefox on iOS”. It’s unclear how Mozilla plans to bring its Firefox browser to iOS, because Apple doesn’t allow third-party browser engines to be used in iOS applications. Even Google Chrome for iOS uses Apple’s engine for rendering the web pages. We’ll see if and how Mozilla will be able to get its browser onto Apple’s mobile platform.
PDF Mod is a simple tool for modifying PDF documents. It can rotate, extract, remove and reorder pages via drag and drop. You can also add/edit the title, subject, author and keywords of a PDF document using PDF Mod. Multiple documents may be combined via drag and drop.
Xmind is a powerful creative tool that makes it simple to gather, analyze and share your ideas with others. It’s one of the most popular mind mapping tools. XMind has simple and intuitive interface that makes you focused only on what really matters — your ideas.
SOFA — Statistics Open For All — is a user-friendly statistics, analysis, & reporting program. SOFA lets you display results in an attractive format ready to share, make charts, produce attractive report tables, perform a range of basic statistical tests. 
GnuCash is a personal and small-business financial-accounting software. GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. It has double-entry bookkeeping, scheduled transactions, mortgage and loan repayment assistant, small business accounting features, multi-currency transaction handling, and other features.
SOFA is an Open Source framework primarily targeted at real-time simulation, with an emphasis on medical simulation. It is mostly intended for the research community to help develop newer algorithms, but can also be used as an efficient prototyping tool.
Mozilla makes Yahoo the default Firefox search engine in the U.S. In Russia it uses Yandex, and Baidu in China. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia will continue to be built-in as alternative search engine options. Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004, and Google will continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features in Firefox..jpg)
Mozilla makes Yahoo the default Firefox search engine in the U.S. In Russia it uses Yandex, and Baidu in China. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia will continue to be built-in as alternative search engine options. Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004, and Google will continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features in Firefox.