Of all the apps I’ve waited to appear for the iPhone, the ones I was most keen to try were the office apps. It sounds a bit sad I know but as I recently posted on the Macworld website comments, sometimes you gain by having less. As computer and Internet use at my employer is heavily monitored the facility to create and edit personal documents without having to go near the company network would be useful and possibly job-saving.
So when Quickoffice surfaced for the iPhone I was cheerily optimistic that my personal documentation-creation tendancies would be well-served. The iPhone has bred and astounding number of third-party apps in the relatively short time it’s been around. I’d tried a few of the other document creation and editing apps available. Most were pretty competent but nearly all were hampered the relativity clumsy way they handled document transfer to a computer. The prefered method was to enable to wifi on the phone then point your conputer’s web browser to the iPhone’s IP address and use the app’s built-in server to copy files to and from the computer. In truth this operation wasn’t quite as inelegant as they sound, WriteRoom for example, and others, made a decent go of it.
Quickoffice on the other hand, whilst it can use this method can also access your MobileMe iDisk, Apple’s paid-for online storage facility, which offers the option of automatically synchronising files from the online iDisk to a mirror iDisk on your computer. You don’t have to have the mirror, you can simply drag and drop files straight to online version, but it makes life a little easier if you choose to sync.
I first came across Quickoffice afew years ago when it was installed by default on a new Nokia N70. Whilst I appreciated the efforts in getting MS Office documents onto a mobile platform that wasn’t powered by Windows, I really couldn’t see the point of doing it on device like an N70 which had a standard phone-sized screen and numerical keypad. It just wasn’t practical to try and edit that report or proposal using a phone keypad. I had the same feeling about Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for the Symbian OS. Whilst I’m sure they were perfectly serviceable on larger screened Symbian and other OS devices, they were next to useless on the N70’s 1.8″ screen.
The iPhone version of Quickoffice then looked like being my new favourite app. As I’ve mentioned, I had tried WriteRoom and I’d also downloaded Mariner Calc, which I had previously encountered in it’s full-sized incarnation on the Mac. Quickoffice then brought all these things together in one app.
A little while ago I had to go abroad to work and was faced with lugging the company’s Neolithic laptop around with me. Then I reasoned that as none of the spreadsheets and reports I had to write were that sensitive I should be able to use Quickoffice. I emailed the blank templates across to my computer, synced them to the iDisk and all was set.
When I returned to the office I simply emailed the files from my phone to my work email address, did a final bit of formatting and sent them to whom it may concern, job done.
Today I decided to use Quickoffice to compose a short article for a newsletter. Although I’d used it in anger while working abroad, the edits only lasted a few minutes as I added more details. Writing the newsletter article meant I had to use the app for a longer period, half an hour or more. Unfortunately that half hour or so seemed to throw up some of Quickoffice’s flaws. Whilst it automatically saved my document regularly, it crashed twice. After restarting ot recovered my piece bar the last few words and all was well. Ten minutes later, it crashed again and this time all was not well. The piece had gone with no sign of it locally on the iPhone or on the iDisk. Now I’m well aware of the importance of regularly and manually saving work, but you know how it is, sometimes it’s a case of do as I say not as I do.
Unfortunately it’s hard to know where to lay the blame for the crashes. Have Apple done something to the latest release of iPhone software which has compromised in turn Quickoffice? Or have Quickoffice’s developers not fully tested their app against the new OS?
However good a piece of software appears to be, however innovative it’s features, if it can’t last the course it’s ultimately not worth having. Because many online vendors have ratings systems for the products they sell it’s no possible to get a good idea of how a product performs before you buy it (or at least how many people read the instructions) and it appears I’m not the only one experiencing issue with this software. We’ll see if Quickoffice improves with the next release of iPhone OS or the next app update.
