Office² HD is one of a select few quality iPad apps that allow Microsoft Works users to access, work on, and keep MS formatting. Microsoft made a lot of late Q4 entries onto the App Store and many are hinting at and hoping they will bring their own mobile suite of productivity apps to iOS soon. Until that happens, however, students and business people who are PC/MS users have had to rely on third-party apps, which have real limitations, particularly when it comes to advanced editing and layout on Apple tablets.

ByteSquared aims to change that. A recent update to Office² HD offers Word users near-desktop quality creation and editing tools for both .doc and .docx files.

Simon Bates, CEO, states: “Office² HD’s latest update transforms mobile office productivity from a secondary method of completing office tasks to a powerful and even preferential manner of quickly and efficiently keeping in touch with your office. I feel this new version easily makes Office² HD the app of choice for editing Microsoft Office documents on iPad.”

We won’t know if it’s “preferential” to an MS app until there is one, but it’s a big step forward and both Word users and Apple should benefit from an app that puts iPad productivity solutions to non-Apple-devoted hands.

Word puzzles have captivated millions throughout history and one company that is pushing the genre in a new direction is Outplay Entertainment with its Word Trick puzzle that rewards players through newly created green “Trick Tiles.” Sure, players can still score big with double word, double letter, triple word and triple letter bonus tiles, but the new green tiles offer even bigger points. For instance, if the user matches four green tiles their score is multiplied by three and if they match five it’s multiplied by four.

After they are used the green tiles turn into yellow tiles so opponents can’t steal points. The game is available now on Facebook for free and is coming to iOS soon. Players are also allowed to compete with up to three others and in as many as 21 games at a time. The game also includes chat features, move histories and reminders via email or Facebook.

When looking back over some of the most exciting developments of the last two years, it would be hard to ignore the groundbreaking cloud gaming solution, OnLive.  The company was founded around the idea of taking dated hardware and allowing gamers to play a high-end gaming experience, all through the streaming power of the internet.

The technology behind the service is impressive enough to provide a quality gaming experience, with very little lag time, which makes today’s announcement a relative no-brainer.  OnLive is planning to apply this streaming technology to desktop virtualization.  All those crazy pipe dreams about being able to have a true desktop experience away from the keyboard may finally be coming to fruition.

iPad will be the first iOS device to be able to fully take advantage of this new technology, when they debut their free OnLive Desktop app soon.  Among the pieces of software available for virtualization at launch will be Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, which are viewed by many as the holy trinity of office productivity.

Though the base application will be a free, there will be microtransations that can be used to add in additional storage space, applications and, you guessed it, games.  There are also plans of releasing a professional tier application, for $9.99 a month. This second service would bump the storage space from a mere 2GBs to a hulking 50GBs, as well as add in even more applications and features.

If the technology works as well as their gaming service has, business folks will undoubtedly be lining up in droves to take part.  Better yet, the company’s use of cloud computing could put the need for purchasing a high end workhorse PC on the back burner, in exchange for an iPad.  That seems like the kind of trade off that the mobile masses could strongly support.  Plus, this sure makes it a whole lot easier to suggest expensing an iPad on the company’s dime. THANK YOU ONLIVE!

Source: Gigaom

It hasn’t been until recently that I’ve really begun to explore my iPhone’s capacity for online gaming. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s certainly not the best platform for drawn-out battles, but it’s great for quick random matches. And it’s a good fit for a game like Wordy Findy.

There’s absolutely nothing to it: just download the app (for free), choose a name to play under and just wait for the next game to start. Matchmaking is handled automatically. Once a game starts, players have around two minutes to find as many words as possible by tracing a line between connecting letters. Completed words earn points based on the values of the letters used and handy information like total available words and points are shown after each game. A scoreboard with each participant’s name and score is also displayed between rounds, igniting those instinctual fires of competition while still providing the more humble with anonymity.

Wordy Findy is in the App Store right now, and it’s completely free. Ad-supported with banners displayed at the bottom of the screen (mercifully out of the way), but still free.

Some game genres have had a rough time in their induction into the App Store (like action hack n’ slashes), but a few genres seem like they’ve been waiting for devices like the iPhone and iPad. Case in point? Word games work out perfectly with iOS. This week, we’ll showcase our Favorite Four word games.

Crosswords
Released ages ago in App Store years, Crosswords is the one word game to rule them all. At the high price point of $9.99, it’s a tough one to buy. We eventually just took the plunge about a year ago and the app has been well worth the cost. The reason it’s worth such a steep price (for an app) is that it’s the last crossword-related purchase anyone will ever need to make. The app is updated from a ton of free sources as well as some paid ones that require subscription info, like the New York Times. We will never run out of crossword puzzles. Our queue is a little backed up currently at 787 puzzles (and we’re not even using all of the free sources, just our favorites!). In our homescreen folder titled “Favorite Games,” Crosswords is the first app.

Words with Friends
It was obvious that a Scrabble-type game had to make the cut for this Favorite Four, but choosing between Scrabble and Words with Friends was quite difficult. We decided on Words with Friends simply because more of our friends play it (it’s cross-platform). While Scrabble would seem to provide more real-life friends to play with (by linking it with the Facebook Scrabble app), it’s simply easier to play with people we know via Words with Friends.


War of the Words (iPad only)
This app is a hidden gem. The app was released last year and still hasn’t had enough ratings for the App Store to display an average rating. We’re hoping that we might change things for the better with this post. War of the Words includes something that more iPad games should: players sitting across from one another. In War of the Words, when a player forms a words, the letter blocks go over to the other player. Whoever fills the other player’s side of the screen first wins. It’s a simple concept but provides some fast-paced wordy fun.

Wheel of Fortune
We can’t leave out one of the most popular word-based game shows: The Wheel of Fortune apps are great. There are plenty of puzzles to solve and the graphics are impressive on the iPad version. Give them a try!
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While Apple was undoubtedly first with their top quality office productivity apps for the iPad, I hear they had an inside advantage, Documents To Go and QuickOffice haven’t been but a couple months behind.

Documents To Go was updated recently to a universal version — meaning it’s optimized for both the iPhone and iPad. So if you had the iPhone version, you would get the iPad version for free. QuickOffice decided to take a different route. But, what they’ve added may make it worthwhile.

Released just earlier tonight, QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad has all of the features of the iPhone version, but rather than just expand all of the on screen controls to allow the app to fill the screen, QuickOffice have made redesigned it somewhat to take advantage of the iPad with newly redesigned controls.

QuickOffice have made it clear that they are not done innovating and adding new features to this app. And I look forward to see where it goes. QuickOffice for the iPad is available now at an introductory price of $9.99.

Documents To Go 2.0 was released today and includes the promised Excel file editor. While we haven’t taken a deep look at it, we’ve tested creating and editing Excel documents and so far are really impressed with the number of features and how quickly it works.

The Excel spreadsheet editor on Documents to Go 2.0 includes the ability to create and edit Microsoft Excel files. This joins the already excellent Word file editor in Documents To Go. The Excel editor works quickly and seems to be fairly full featured. One huge standard feature of Excel files are the functions — the ability to enter a function and have it process other numbers in the spreadsheet in a certain way. Figuring sums, percentages, etc. A huge list of functions are included with the editor and populating the variables in the function is easily done by clicking cells as you would on the desktop. The editor also includes support for multiple pages in each spreadsheet.

Dataviz have increased the price for Documents to Go, which they have said all along they would do with the 2.0 update release. The regular version is now $9.99 (up from $6.99). We don’t know yet what the Microsoft Exchange price increase will be as it hasn’t been updated at the time of this article.

After the jump, take a look at some more screen shots of the new Excel file editor.

Continue reading Documents To Go Updated to 2.0 – Includes Excel Editor »

Sunday here in the US and what pops into the App Store? Documents To Go from Dataviz. Documents To Go is a document syncing, storage, viewing, and editing app with some very interesting and unique features. This app has been hotly anticipated as a top quality business app and a great way to edit documents while you only have access via your phone.

Dataviz has had a long history in the Mac world. They started out doing document conversion software for early Macs — remember when Macintosh software couldn’t read Windows files? Of late they have focused in on providing syncing and editing software for mobile devices. Their Documents To Go application has been available on many other mobile platforms, Palm, Windows, Blackberry. This release on the iPhone brings them back to the Apple world.

This initial release comes on two forms, the main Documents To Go and an Exchange Attachments edition. Both versions consist of both a desktop application (Windows or Mac), and an iPhone OS application. The desktop application allows you to choose which files you want to sync to the mobile device — either individual files or folders. If you choose a folder, any new files in that folder will be automatically synced. We should point out that this is true 2-way syncing. Changes either on the desktop or the iPhone are synced automatically when the devices next connect. Much better than many file storage and viewing apps that only do one way transfer and fail to sync any changes.

The document types that you can sync and view include all of the usual Microsoft Office and iWork ’08 formats. Also supported are all of the basic text files and image formats that the iPhone can display.

Beyond the normal file viewing, this initial release also allows you to edit Microsoft Word documents (.doc and .docx formats). The Word file editor is pretty robust and feature rich and seems to do a really good job maintaining the document formatting. Dataviz have promised a free upgrade to Documents To Go with Microsoft Excel editing as well though that’s not currently available.

Documents To Go’s major competitor on the iPhone is QuickOffice which we previously reviewed and found to be pretty solid. QuickOffice does offer one feature that Documents To Go has yet to implement, Microsoft Excel editing. We’ll take a full look at Documents To Go in the coming days.

Documents To Go is available now at an introductory price of just $4.99 (for 2 weeks).

The second version of Documents To Go released today, the Exchange Attachment edition, does all of the above plus gives you direct access to your Microsoft Exchange server email attachments.

Appearing as a new folder on your documents list, this support allows you to download, view, and even edit and forward documents attached to your email messages. You are presented with all of your email messages that have attachments and can view the messages and the attachments in a more file focused view, with the attachments at the top of the message. From there you can save the attachments locally, forward them, or edit them.

In addition to getting access to your attachments stored on the Exchange server, you can forward any attachment you have stored locally in an email via your Exchange server.

This extra support for remote attachments storage should be a great extra feature for those people that use Exchange.

The Exchange Attachment edition is available now at an introductory price of $9.99 (for 2 weeks).