Mobile Apple Me

Provides: Document, spreadsheet, and pesentation creation/editing on iPad
Compatibility: iPad
Price: $7.99 (or $5.99 each for the individual Doc/Sheet/Slide apps)
Availability: Now

At Macworld | iWorld 2012, the byte² team (all the way from  London) was there to show off their Office² HD app (that is Office-squared, not Office-two). Billed as “more than just a text editor”, Office² HD allows for the creation and editing of text, presentation, and spreadsheet documents with full support for the standard Microsoft office formats doc/docx, ppt/pptx, and xls/xlsx. With a strong focus on use in education environments (especially useful given Apple’s iPad push into education with iBooks), Office² HD is actually a viable office replacement that further elevates the iPad to a full laptop replacement.

Features

For only $7.99, Office² HD offers a stunning array of features. byte² also offers separate apps called Doc², Sheet², and Slide², with Office² HD being a full bundle of all three apps, and all apps are designed to be mobile equivalents of their Microsoft Office desktop app counterparts (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint).  Although the text editor is the most developed in terms of available features, support for spreadsheets and presentations is sufficient to view, manipulate, and create basic documents of those types. Complex formatting and transitions/animations, for example, are not supported, though the app offers an impressive list of available Excel Functions.

Text editing features include:

• Ability to create rich formatted Office-compatible Word docs (.doc/.docx) or text-only .txt files
• Support for a variety of formatting options, including footnotes, endnotes, page/column/section breaks, tab stops, bold/italic/underline, and bulleted/numeric lists
• Images can be inserted from your media library or by using standard shapes (boxes, stars, etc.), with full tap-and-drag layout with text wrapping and layer support (put text in front of a shape for example)
• Fulll MLA-style bibliography formatting support 

Spreadsheet and presentation features include:

• Support for a wide variety of spreadsheet functions grouped into General, Mathematical, Date & Time, Statistical, Trigonometric, Logical, and String categories
• Ability to format cell contents, including the number type (Currency, percentage, etc.), sort, filter, and search, as well as aligning/merging text and adding borders
• Presentation slide layout options include a choice of four templates (title, title+1 column, title+2 columns, or blank)
• Slides can contain text, shapes, or images from your media library, though no text wrapping is available
• Playing a slideshow is a cinch with simple swipe-to-navigate control (though complex animations or builds will have to be added later via Powerpoint) 

The Good, the Bad, the…Confusing?

Overall, Office² HD displays a remarkable level of polish and genuine utility; it truly rises to the level of an MS Office replacement for simple users creating and editing documents on an iPad (a Bluetooth keyboard is practically a necessity for larger documents). The app features great filesharing options to get documents into/out of the app, including built-in emailing and an FTP server to easily share documents between your desktop computer and iPad. File management is outstanding, allowing you to easily access any WebDAV folder or services such as iDisk, DropBox, Google Docs, Box, and open-source collaboration platform Alfresco. The file management even allows you to create folders and move documents as desired between them on your chosen storage…which leads to one of the app’s major drawbacks.

One thing that every user will notice right off the bat is a slightly odd icon in an iPad app: a floppy disk icon in the menu bar. Yes, this app has a save button (most iPad apps autosave the work you are doing), but that old habit of Command-S just is not a part of the iPad experience (nor is mucking around with a hierarchical file system). Although the app will prompt saves when you switch documents, there is no such warning when you push the Home button to exit the app/switch to another. If you fire up another app that requires additional memory, you will lose work; during testing, the app crashed a number of times, which also resulted in lost data and work—the app’s reviews mention crash issues, and release notes indicate the byte² team is actively working to resolve these. Although this feature is designed to make Office² HD a more natural experience for MS Office veterans, it is fundamentally at odds with the iPad user experience, and forces an uncomfortable shift back to the PC era (remember, iPad is all about Post-PC).

There are a few minor issues with this app, though no show stoppers; really, more rough edges that require some additional polishing. First, there are a number of non-sticky settings, such as on-the-fly spellcheck in text files, so you must re-enable them every time you open a document. The app also creates backup files of everything you edit, which can make it difficult to find the right file if you access your documents via the inbuilt FTP server (you end up mucking around in metadata to find your desired file).

The really shameful thing about ByteSquared’s incredible Office² HD is that such a fully featured MS Office replacement app could be created by such a small team.  Microsoft has thousands of very talented software engineers on their payroll, yet three years after the iPad came out we still have no official Office for iPad app (though rumors suggest there might be one soon). With a Bluetooth keyboard, ByteSquared’s Office² HD can easily make the iPad a fully featured laptop replacement for mobile office workers. If the crushing weight of a MacBook Air is simply too much, grab your iPad instead and hit the road!

Appletell Rating:

Buy Office2 HD

The Vimeo iOS app has just been updated with a major 2.0 release approximately a year after being introduced for the iPhone and iPod touch. This update, which was introduced today at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, adds support for the iPad and a few other new features as well. Among these are integration of the Vimeo Music Store within the video editor, now allowing users to use purchased music in their videos.

The update (as well as the app for first-time downloaders) are completely free on the App Store.

Version 2.0′s release notes follow:

• New, native iPad UI and an updated, easier to use iPhone UI
• Vimeo Music Store integration in the video editor
• Shoot video, create projects, and browse our featured channels without logging in or signing up
• View your Subscriptions, Likes, and Watch Later album
• Share, add comments, and view licenses, credits, and likes on other peoples’ videos

Via 9to5 Mac

Within the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing tons of stories about the AT&T unlimited data throttling debacle, with users seeing their data speed reduced to 2G EDGE on their iPhone. AT&T has approximately about 17 million customers signed with their “unlimited data” plans that can be subject to throttling due to a new policy which gives the company freedom to modify the customers’ contract if data usage is so high in demand that it slows down their networks.

At least one man who became dissatisfied with the service decided to take the matter to small claims court. Last week, The Associated Press reported an iPhone owner, named Matt Schiaparelli, filed a claim in a California court against AT&T for unfairly reducing bandwidth speeds on his unlimited data plan. Mr. Schiaparelli noticed a speed reduction on his iPhone data connection after a 1.5 GB to 2 GB of data usage within several billing cycles on his monthly bill. After presenting his case, Judge Russell Nadel, granted him $850 on claims that the telecom’s throttling measures are unfair to consumers.

This isn’t the first time iPhone users called to complain about the speed-throttling of AT&T; many customers have reported many times of data speeds so low as to almost make the phone useless. Yet, the only response that has been given to them was to switch to a “tiered data plan” on which subscribers are never throttled. On AT&T’s network for those consumers that were grandfathered into staying with their unlimited data plan, it costs $30 per month, while the tiered plans cost between $20, $30 and $50 per month for 300 MB, 3 GB and 5 GB.

The AP noted that Mr. Schiaparelli originally sought $10,000 from the claim, but was only awarded an $85 for each of the remaining 10 months of his contract. According to the listed terms of AT&T’s arbitration agreement, a customer could be able to a compensation for the amount of $10,000 from the claim. Unfortunately for Spaccarelli, that does not include issues that could be brought up in small a claim court system.

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter stated, ”The company is evaluating the next steps, including appeal. But at the end of the day, our contract governs our relationship with our customers.”

Via The Associated Press

After briefly appearing in the App Store this weekend before being pulled down, Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad 2 has now been officially launched from Mobile World Congress, and is available for purchase for $9.99. “Adobe Photoshop Touch offers core Photoshop features, as well as new capabilities for creating and sharing in an app custom-built for tablets.”

Photoshop Touch gives users the ability to combine multiple photos into layered images, make essential edits and apply professional effects to create beautiful artwork, touch up photos, paint, lay out ideas and much more. The Scribble Selection Tool allows users to easily extract objects in an image by simply scribbling on what to keep, and then what to remove. With Refine Edge technology from Photoshop, even hard-to-select areas with soft edges are easily captured when making selections. Photoshop Touch helps users quickly find images and share creations through integration with Facebook and Google Image Search.

Adobe Photoshop Touch features include:

• Use popular Photoshop features designed for iPad, such as layers, selection tools, adjustments, and filters to create mindblowing images.
• Use your iPad camera to fill an area on a layer with the unique camera fill feature.
• Select part of an image to extract by scribbling with the Scribble Selection tool. With Refine Edge, use your fingertip to capture even hard-to-select image elements (like hair) with ease.
• Search and acquire images with the integrated Google Image Search.
• Share images on Facebook and view comments right within the app.
• Browse an inspirational gallery for the styles and results you’d like to achieve. Then follow step-by-step tutorials to easily learn echniques the pros use for great-looking results.
• Use AirPrint for wireless printing of Photoshop Touch projects.
• Upload projects to Adobe Creative Cloud and open layered files from Adobe Photoshop Touch in Photoshop CS5.
• Maximum image resolution: 1600×1600 pixels

Adobe Photoshop Touch requires and iPad 2 running iOS 5 or later. It’s available now in the iTunes App Store for $9.99.

Product Adobe Photoshop Touch