Personal Technology » editing

Quickoffice Brings Editing to iPhones, But Put It on Hold

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:04:03 +0000

I am typing these words in a full-fledged word processor on an Apple iPhone. It’s a third-party app that allows you to edit, format or create Microsoft Word and Excel documents, and then send them back to a PC or Mac where they can be opened in Word or Excel. Oh, and it has cut, copy and paste in its word processor — a capability long missing from the iPhone that isn’t due from Apple (AAPL) itself until this summer.

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Devotees of older smart phones, tired of iPhone hype, will be quick to note this is no innovation. Devices like Windows Mobile phones, Palm (PALM) Treos and BlackBerrys have made these abilities available for years. But, for the 37 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners, it’s potentially a major step forward, closing a hole in a hand-held computing platform that is otherwise more elegant and versatile than any other.

This new app, called Quickoffice, has some nice features. Its cut, copy and paste function is very well designed. It can save files locally on the phone. It has a built-in email function for sending files to others, and it can upload or download files to and from a PC or Mac, or to and from online storage.

But there’s a catch. While Quickoffice, which is also available on other platforms, did work OK in my tests, it has some major drawbacks that keep me from recommending it right now. The product’s maker, Quickoffice Inc., acknowledges these and is working to fix them by summer. But, especially because Quickoffice costs $19.99, a Rolls-Royce price in the iPhone’s app store, you might want to hold off on buying it until the fixes are in place.

In particular, Quickoffice can’t simply load and edit any Word or Excel file you receive as an email attachment. The company claims this is a built-in iPhone limitation, but it’s still a big problem for users. Instead, to get files into Quickoffice for editing, you have to transfer them using a Wi-Fi network from your PC or Mac, or from the iDisk online storage feature of Apple’s MobileMe Web service, which costs $99 a year.

Also, amazingly, Quickoffice shipped without any automatic typo-correcting function or spell checker. For various technical reasons, it couldn’t even use the one built into the iPhone. So, you have to do a lot of correcting of typos once the file gets onto a computer. For instance, the first words of this column, as originally created in Quickoffice, read: “I am typing these words in a full-feledged word pricessor … ” I had to clean them up in Word on my laptop.

The Quickword app on iPhone

And, while you can view a text or spreadsheet file in landscape mode, you can do only limited editing of text documents in this mode, and no editing at all of spreadsheet documents viewed in landscape.

Quickoffice for the iPhone consists of three modules. One is Quickword, the word processor. The second is Quicksheet, the spreadsheet program. These two, also separately available from the app store at $12.99 each, can handle standard Microsoft (MSFT) .doc and . xls files, but not Microsoft’s newer .docx and .xlsx formats. The third module, called Quickoffice Files, merely transfers and displays files, but doesn’t allow editing or creating them. It handles a much wider variety of file types, and is sold separately for $1.99.

Cut, copy and paste is implemented nicely. You simply double-tap to select a word or triple-tap to select a paragraph. Small dots appear at either end of the selection, allowing you to expand or contract the selected section of text. Once your selection is done, you can then cut it or copy it, or change its formatting. To cut or copy your selection, you just choose cut or copy from a popup menu. To paste, you tap once elsewhere in the document, and then select Paste from a popup menu. You can paste text copied or cut from one Quickword document into another, but not into any other app on the iPhone. (Apple will add that ability this summer.)

Quickword is the better of the two main modules. It has an impressive suite of features, including the ability to bold or italicize characters, change fonts and colors, create bullet points, and undo or redo changes. All of this formatting was retained correctly when I transferred the files to a computer, and vice versa. Quickword doesn’t have every feature of Word on a computer, but its feature set is strong.

Quicksheet has 125 functions. It also does formatting of cells well, and has undo and redo. Again, it isn’t as powerful as Excel, but its capabilities are decent. Unfortunately, unlike in the word processor, I found some problems in Quicksheet. In one simple spreadsheet I imported, it failed to properly display text that stretched across multiple cells, and failed to do a simple recalculation that worked perfectly in Excel. Also, it lacks cut, copy and paste.

Getting documents into the app is a pain. Unless you have a MobileMe account, on either Windows or Mac, you have to type a geeky numerical address into a Web browser and then choose a file from your computer using the browser page that comes up.

Quickoffice is an OK start, but it needs a lot of work.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Adobe Web Photo Site Is Great for Editing, but Lacks Some Basics

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:01:00 +0000

The biggest name in photo software for many years has been Adobe’s Photoshop. But, as more and more photos migrated online, Adobe (ADBE) became concerned that people would associate photo software less with its own locally installed programs than with Web-based products and services.

So, last month, the photo giant introduced Photoshop Express, its free Web-based service for storing, sharing and editing photos, in an effort to compete with established online photo services such as Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr, Google’s (GOOG) Picasa Web Albums, or the photo-laden Facebook social-networking service.

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Photoshop Express has many of the same features as Flickr and its ilk. It gives you two free gigabytes of photo storage. But Adobe is hoping to make its mark with editing.

Most online photo services offer little or no editing, assuming you’ll do that using software on your computer before you upload your pictures. But Photoshop Express, borrowing from Adobe’s deep knowledge of photo editing, offers the nicest set of Web-based editing tools I have seen. They are sophisticated for a consumer application, yet easy to use. They edge out those in Picnik, a pioneering Web-based photo editor I hailed last year.

These slick editing tools are not only available for use with photos you’ve uploaded from your hard disk. You can also use them to edit pictures stored in your accounts at Facebook, Picasa Web Albums and another big photo-storage service, Photobucket — all without leaving Photoshop Express. You can even move pictures between Photoshop Express and these three services just by dragging and dropping.

Adobe’s new service is available in the U.S. only, at www.photoshop.com/express.

I’ve been testing Photoshop Express and its service overall is pretty good, even though it’s still labeled “beta.” It’s a nice example of the Web 2.0 trend, where programs accessed via a browser can look and feel like applications that live on your computer.

But Photoshop Express is rough around the edges. It can be slow at times, and it’s missing some obvious features, like the ability to easily download publicly shared pictures from other members or to print photos. Adobe says it is working on these things.

Photoshop Express isn’t meant to replicate all the features and power of Photoshop. It’s more like a Web-based version of Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s consumer software package.

I tested Photoshop Express on multiple computers: PCs running Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows XP and Windows Vista, and Macs running Apple’s (AAPL) Leopard operating system. I used it in all three major Web browsers: Internet Explorer for Windows, Firefox on both Windows and Mac, and Safari, also on both platforms. It worked fine in all of these operating systems and browsers, though it does require Adobe’s free Flash software.

For my tests, I uploaded from my computers dozens of photos, from very large images captured with good digital cameras to smaller shots from cellphones. All were handled perfectly by Photoshop Express. I also opened and edited pictures in Photoshop Express from my accounts on Picasa Web Albums and Facebook. All of this worked well, though uploads of large images can be slow if your Web connection is pokey.

Photoshop Express is a handsome product, presenting your photos on a gray background with controls and features arrayed at the top and bottom, and down the sides, in a logical, clear manner. Your own photos are presented in a section called “My Photos,” and can be organized into albums. Photos that other Photoshop Express users have chosen to publicly share are organized into collections called “Galleries,” which can include multiple albums. You access these community photos by simply clicking on “Browse” or performing a search.

For each album you create, you can choose to share it publicly or to keep it private. Whichever option you choose, you can email friends either a link for viewing the album or a single photo. Your own photos can be downloaded at a variety of resolutions, including original size.

When you view shared galleries or albums, they appear as slide shows. You can select a number of slick effects by which the slides appear, allowing them to zoom and glide into place from various directions.

The editing features really stand out. In addition to standard tools such as auto-correction and red-eye elimination, Photoshop Express lets you touch up areas; adjust exposure, saturation, and lighting; and even make certain colors pop — so grass is greener, for instance. And, in most cases, it shows you small example images illustrating the changes, then previews those changes in the larger main image just by moving your mouse over the example. You can revert to your original at any time.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems. Photos, especially large ones, can take awhile to appear in the editing module and to snap into focus. Captions sometimes get lost or mixed up when you move photos to other services. You can view shared albums only as slide shows, not as individual photos.

Still, Adobe has made a good start with Photoshop Express, and it’s worth a try if you want better online editing for your pictures.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.