• Tweet

For many people, one of the most important features that an iPhone and other iOS devices still lacks is native support for Office documents, namely, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Surprisingly, Microsoft has announced that it will bring the popular productivity suite to iOS devices sometime next year.
However, there are a few excellent alternatives in the App Store that we have showed you already, like Google Drive and Dropbox. Even so, what these apps offer are more like workarounds and not a direct way to interact with your Office documents.
Thankfully though, CloudOn solves that with an app that allows you to access, create and edit all your Office documents on the go, and does so while integrating with other services so everything is kept up to date.
Here’s is a quick look at how CloudOn works.
Upon opening the app you will be greeted with a short, but useful demo showcasing the app’s most important features. Once within the app, you are presented with your accounts’ panel, where you can access all of your documents from some of the most important online services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and SkyDrive.
 
Once you start navigating each of the services within the app (Dropbox in this case), you will feel right at home with the interface, since CloudOn follows how files are organized on each of them.
 
Note: While CloudOn is powerful enough to handle most Office documents, I found it odd that it wouldn’t recognize some simple .TXT files.
Of course, CloudOn is not about opening simple text files, so I immediately tried it out with some quite heavy Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.
Working with spreadsheets on CloudOn turned out to be like walking with shoes among dunes, which means that it was mostly pleasant but with a few annoyances here and there. On the positive side, CloudOn had no trouble opening even the most data-heavy spreadsheets that I threw at it. However, scrolling through them brought memories of some of the worst web apps that I’ve tried on the iPhone. I have an iPhone 4S, which is no slouch but still, navigating through my spreadsheets felt slow.

CloudOn almost instantly makes up for it however, with the variety of editing options that it offers for you to tweak and work with your spreadsheets. It doesn’t offer the full array of Microsoft Excel’s editing tools but what was there worked well and was far more than anyone editing spreadsheets from a smartphone should need.



 

The experience while working with Word documents was slightly better, with my documents not lagging that much when scrolling through them and with the variety of editing tools offered being on par with what was offered for spreadsheets.
 
 
Syncing also worked as expected, with every edit that I made on my documents updating almost instantly on my Dropbox folder.


Besides the normal document editing tools, CloudOn also offers you the ability to create both folders and documents from the ground up, all of which worked without problems in my tests. When working with photo files though, I noticed that not all of them showed well on more than one occasion, which must surely be caused due to a glitch or bug in the app that needs fixing.

One last important feature that I almost forgot to mention about CloudOn is its Recent Files option, which shows the most recent files you’ve worked with, saving lots of time that would otherwise be spent browsing and searching for them.

Conclusions

It is true that in less than a year Microsoft will finally offer a set of native iOS Office apps, yet in my case I really don’t see the need for them. Office has become a tool needed mostly by companies and by those who create complex documents. For everyone else, options like CloudOn (and other inexpensive productivity tools on the App Store) offer great functionality for free.

Via Guidingtech

If there is something that has changed radically in the past few years with the advent of new technologies is the way we consume news. News media has migrated from being delivered almost exclusively via TV, radio and newspapers to being consumed by many people via the web.
This tendency has increased dramatically with the boom of smartphones and tablets, doing together to print news what email did to traditional “snail” mail years ago.
However, while nowadays most people get their news via Facebook, Twitter and other similar online social networking services, these are more like “digested” or “summarized” news, which rarely elaborate or provide depth.
If you use news readers though, you know that you can get and consume your news on your iPhone in a way that resembles the more “traditional” methods, providing you with much deeper and better news articles. The problem is that news reader apps tend to be paid apps (at least the good ones used to be), but it wasn’t until recently that some noteworthy, free alternatives became available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
Let’s take a look at the two best of them.

What Exactly are News Feeds and Readers?

Despite every news site sporting its own Facebook and Twitter accounts, most, if not all relevant news channels still offer news feeds and RSS channels to which one can easily subscribe to using a service like Google Reader, which gathers all the news from the news’ sources that you like.

Important Information: News feeds and RSS channels are streamlined versions of news created specifically for reader to subscribe using news reader services. If you have a Google account, you already have what you need to start subscribing to some RSS feeds. Head over to Google Reader to learn more.

2 Best News Readers for iOS

Flipboard

The first of these is Flipboard, a self-proclaimed “social magazine” that gathers all the best news from the web from among a series of topics that you specify and that also allows you to pull news from your Google Reader account, making it perhaps the most varied and versatile free news reader out there.



 
Its interface is very simple and intuitive, with users needing only to “flip” through articles to scan across them. That said, it is not the most efficient reader due to its interface, since it doesn’t show as many news as other alternatives on one screen.
 

Feedly

Our other alternative is Feedly, a more recent contender in the news reader space that offers a more traditional interface, but keeping things still a bit fresh with some original navigations elements. Feedly also syncs with your Google Reader account, making it fairly easy to pull your news from Google’s service to read in the app.
 
Navigation within the app is ok, although you might need to adjust some settings in order to tailor it to your liking.
 

Conclusions

In both cases these apps allow you to save articles for later reading either within the apps themselves or through popular read-later services like Instapaper and Pocket (which we compared in this article).

This puts them on par even with paid news readers and makes them very important alternatives for anyone who likes to read news the way their writers intended. Make sure to check out both apps, since they offer very different experiences, which gives you even more to choose from. And best of all? You get all these choices at no cost!