Last week Microsoft made available its famous Office suite on iPads, iPhones and Android phones for free. There is always a high demand for quality office productivity applications on any platform. No wonder that LibreOffice and OpenOffice in the cloud are by far the most popular applications in our catalog. With free Microsoft Office applications entering the playground it useful to check how different office solutions for mobile devices compare against one another.
We tried Microsoft Office on iPad and Android phone and here is what we think about our experience.
First things first — when you start an app you see a login screen. Here you have to login with your Microsoft account. While this can be natural for long time Microsoft users, not all of the iPad users have Microsoft accounts, so they’ll have to create new account to use the app. At the same time to work with rollApp applications you can login with your existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter or Amazon account. Chances are high that you have at least one of those. Also, you can “test drive” any application without login to get a grasp of functionality and features.
While asking to login may seem unfortunate it is the only way to give users ability to securely access their files, which very often do not originate from the mobile device where the application is launched. On both iPad and Android Microsoft Office allows you to get files from OneDrive and Dropbox cloud storage. In addition to that on iPad you can work with local files, which you get to and from the device via the iTunes, when it is connected to your laptop or desktop computer. Applications on rollApp offer wider range of supported cloud storage: you can store your documents on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk. And more options are coming in the future.
Mobile version of Microsoft Office, naturally, offers best possible compatibility with file formats of older brother — Microsoft Office for desktop. What may come as a surprise is that mobile version only supports basic editing and formatting, while more advanced features are not there at all or require a premium subscription. For instance, things like changing page orientation or inserting WordArt in Word, or customization of pivot tables and adding chart elements in Excel are premium features available only to Office 365 subscribers. Overall, the mobile version of Microsoft Office is underpowered comparing to its desktop ancestor. On the other hand, LibreOffice and OpenOffice on rollApp are full-featured applications that bring all the power and advanced features of the desktop office suite right at the hands of mobile users. They have familiar interface and with rollApp are available in their full glory on any device and platform: Chromebook, iPad, Android tablet or phone, or Kindle Fire. We do our best to make more friendly and natural for mobile users with features like virtual mouse.
Pricing is also an important part. Microsoft Office for mobile is available for free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, but offers only a limited functionality. Premium subscription to Office for $6.99 per month will unlock premium features in mobile office and also give you license to use office applications on your PC and 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage.
With rollApp you get all the applications functions including advanced for free with ad-supported account, which gives access to more than 100 apps with no limitations. rollApp premium subscription (also $6.99 per month) gives you ad-free access to apps and extended platform features. For example, your application will be running on the server for 1 hour (instead of 10 minutes in the free version), when you intentionally or unintentionally disconnect from it.
All in all, Microsoft has released a great application with slick design and great functionality for premium users. The free version is fairly limited, but includes the most necessary functions for mobile users. Office applications on rollApp would work better for users who need power without compromises and value the ability to use the same full-featured applications on wide variety of platforms.
Anyway, more choice is always better for the users and we hope this overview will help you choose what’s best for you. Also, we will highly appreciate your suggestions and ideas on how to make rollApp more useful. You can share them with us in Twitter, Facebookand Google+.
Welcome to our digest. Let’s look together at the events and news of this week.
One of the most awaited news of this week is release of first devices with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Unfortunately, Nexus 9 is the only device available to try new Material design live. The device, naturally, prompted a lot of reviews of the new Nexus and surprisingly or not the opinions are very mixed. You can get all you need to know from detailed reviews from TechCrunch, The Verge or Mashable. Also, we highly recommend review of the reviews by one of reddit users ;-)
Adobe Brackets – open-source editor for web developers – hits 1.0 release. The team has added awesome stuff in this release: multiple cursors, split view, theme support, and many more fixes and enhancements. There is already a vibrant community around Brackets, which built and continues to build useful extensions and themes to boost your productivity with the editor. One of the cool features, which sets Brackets apart from the rest of text editor crowd, is side-by-side live preview of changes in you make in the code.
Google released Application Launcher for Drivethat allows to open files from your Google Drive using applications installed on your computer. After installing the extension when you right-click on a file, select “Open with” option to see a list of compatible applications to open the file.
Mozilla and GSMA team up to help developing localized, cultural context-aware, non-English content for the Web. With more low-price smartphones, such as the handsets powered by Mozilla’s Firefox OS, this would make Web more reachable for the next 4 billion people, who currently do not have access to the Internet. Initial field tests in Bangladesh, Kenya, Brazil and India are currently underway.
As you know, rollApp is all about working with different applications on different devices and we have been pushing this idea for quite a time already. It is always great to see others embrace this idea as well. The other day Microsoft Announced RemoteIE, which allows to run Internet Explorer on Android, iOS and Mac OS X. That’s good news for developers because they can now quickly spin up the latest Internet Explorer builds for testing regardless of their operating system or development environment. You can try the service right now here.
Also, this week winners of the The Tabby Awards /Business were announced. Check out some of the best business applications for tablets in this rating.
Enjoy your reading. Have a nice week-end and keep in touch!
Today rollApp allows to work with many desktop applications on devices like tablets and smartphones and developers of those applications wouldn’t even this that this ever will be a possibility. However, there are desktop applications, which fell very natural on touch screen devices, so that you sometimes would not even believe that they originated in the desktop world. One of such apps isXournal – note-taking app with a unique blend of tools for creativity and organization.
Xournal is an easy to use application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus (or a finger). Xournal aims to provide superior graphics quality (via subpixel rendering) and strike a balance between power and usability.
Organize your day without constraints
Ever tried to draw a round circle with a pen, let alone stylus? Xournal’s “Shape Recognizer” gets you covered. When enabled, the app will automatically recognize circles and rectangles you draw and replace them with nicely-looking, sharp shapes. This feature comes in handy, when you need to create a more formal professionally-looking illustrations.
Also, with the Text tool you can quickly type notes with the keyboard and easily change the font, size and color of the text. It’s very useful when you need to create a longer note. Then if you need to add a punch to an important part of the text, you can highlight it with the “Highlighter” pretty much like you would use a highlight marker on a printed page.
Easily express your ideas while on the move
Another great feature of Xournal is PDF annotation. When you load a PDF file to Xournal, you can then use all of the application’s tools to draw and write on top the pages of the file.
Xournal also supports exporting to PDF, so you can easily share your notes with friends and be sure that they will be able to view them.
Check out Xournal manual for in-depth description of functions and features of the application.
The app is always with you on the move or at home: on your PC, tablet and even phone. Plus, you get access to your files from your cloud storage: Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and OneDrive.
It’s Friday and in our digest we look back at the most interesting tech news of the week.
Project Ara – modular phone from Google – is making progress. The idea of project Ara is to create a modular smartphone with hardware elements that can be customized according to user’s needs. The phone is built using different blocks that can be interchanged, so that desirable configuration can be created with a reasonable cost. Google is pushing the Project Ara as a revolutionary concept that will make phones affordable for 5 billion people that don’t have a phone yet. In the video below you can get a sense of how it is coming together in the prototype called Spiral 1.
The next prototype, Spiral 2, is expected to be introduced in January.
HP announced its new Sprout PC, which is built purely for touch interactions. Sprout has 23-inch touchscreen display, built-in projector and multi-touch mat. The projector is equipped with a 4-camera system, a HP DLP projector, and an LED desk lamp. This system will let you scan and manipulate 2D and 3D objects directly into the PC, type onto projected keyboard, draw on the touch mat with the stylus and and much more.
Google released a brand new Bookmarks Manager extension that replaces current Chrome bookmarks management UI. When you “star” a page, it automatically grabs image from the page adding a vibrant touch to otherwise pale list of bookmarks. The great thing is that it will also add images to all of your existing bookmarks as well.
Another cool feature is Auto Folders – it automatically groups all your bookmarks by topics. Also with new extensions you can easily make your bookmark folders public and share them with your friends. This extension requires Chrome 38 and you have be signed into Chrome and have sync enabled.
There are a lot of applications available in the cloud via rollApp. A special place among them goes to graphics tools such as professional CAD programs.
Today we want to tell you about LibreCAD – powerful application for 2D computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting. LibreCAD is used across a wide range of industries (such as engineering, construction, architecture and other industrial fields), by architects, project managers, engineers, designers, and other professionals.
The application has an easy to use and customizable interface, it allows to use layers to create your blueprints and provides an ability to quickly measure lengths and dimensions right inside the drawing.
LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature CAD application, which is great in many regards:
It’s free – no worry about license costs or annual fees. And with rollApp it is available on any device equipped with a web browser.
LibreCAD can imports files created with AutoCAD (.dxf) and in LucasFilm Format (.lff).
LibreCAD can export drawings to wide range of formats: .bw, .eps, .epsf, .epsi, .pcx, .rgb, .rgba, .sgi, .tga, .bmp, .gp2, .gpg, .pic, .ppm, .tif, .xbn, .xpm, .xv.
With the application running on powerful servers in the cloud it is now feasible to do your design work or review blueprints even on a relatively low-end devices like Chromebooks and even tablets.
With Halloween around the corner you can put LibreCAD to work to help you create great decorations for the holiday.
As you know, rollApp is all about working with different applications on different devices and we have been pushing this idea for quite a time already. It is always great to see others embrace this idea as well. The other day Microsoft Announced RemoteIE, which allows to run Internet Explorer on Android, iOS and Mac OS X. That’s good news for developers because they can now quickly spin up the latest Internet Explorer builds for testing regardless of their operating system or development environment. You can try the service right now here.
