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CloudOn Brings Free Cloud-Hosted Microsoft Office Functionality to iPad
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Having attended the Office 2011 preview/intro sessions where they fielded questions about iPad/iOS native apps, they seemed keenly aware that you don't just drop "Office" onto a tablet, and were interested in bringing over specific mobile functionality that made sense.
Its already been 37 months since iWorks has been updated. At the rate they are reaching feature parity it will be another 10 years for an iWork for Mac update. I'm not even looking into the iPad version of iWork until the Mac version is shown to be live & well. This plus a couple more updates to make Numbers even worth looking at. We use pages to do our Christmas letter & birthday & occasion cards. But for business use we still use Word. Excel still has no competition for our use. Doing a lot of income tax prep our use of Excel to do that part of the business plus much of the accounting work means that Numbers will never be used by us. It would be nice if it could get to the level of being good enough to use for even simple spreadsheets.
I don't know how anyone could think that any of the iWork apps for the iPad could do a better job with MS Office apps than actually using the real thing. iWork is not the real thing. It is not even close.
With no updates in over 37 months I thought that that meant that iWork for the Mac was dead, but it would live on on the iPad until MS or some other 3rd party did a better job with the standard MS Office apps.
I've used MS Excel on my Macs since 1985. No one has shown that they can come close to MS Excel. Even MS is having trouble keeping Excel as good as it was. Just like Apple screwed up the Mac OS with Mac OS 10.7 Lion, MicroSoft has screwed up Excel with things like the ribbon. But the ribbon & most other things can be turned off, but the speed does not come back. With Lion many things can be turned off but not all. And who knows about the speed thing. iOS will soon have the same problems that Apple & MS has with their OSes. Adding things to make things look better but really only hurting the user use & experience.
Apple & MS both seem to want one OS each. But there are still a lot of different needs between desktop & laptop computers compared to smart phones & tablets.
Is this totally not working for anyone else? I downloaded it 2 hrs ago and haven't been able to use it yet. Synced to Dropbox with no problems, but can't open or creat any documents/ppt's.
You beat me to it. I just tried to download the app and am told "The item you tried to buy is no longer available."
Pulled?
Reminds me of this miserable excuse for a commercial:
Is there really anything here you can't get from RDP back to a Windows PC or VNC to a Mac?
B
I don't mean to be insulting, but it's a pet peeve of mine. Their name is Microsoft. Spell it with a dollar sign if you like, at least that's intentional, but writing it the old way is just incorrect. Okay, rant over.
I think I know where you're going with this, but your post sounds just like venting.
Clearly, Excel works great for your small company (33 year old, 4 or less employees, less than $500k per year). That's your company and Excel fits the bill. Major financial firms do most of their business using custom financial software packages. Some scientists and business people prefer Numbers because it's more presentation-oriented with nice charts and graphs. Then there are other who use Numbers for iPad to do editing on the go.
These all fulfill a requirement for someone, all for slightly different purposes, but they don't work for everyone. Sure, they all do number calculations, but differently with separate expected behavior. The desktop versions tend to be more productive because you have a precise pointing device and full-size keyboard, maybe with a number pad.
It sounds like you have no need for anything other than Excel, and a non-desktop version of anything won't suffice. But I'd venture to guess that a desktop version on a tablet won't be sufficient for most anyone on a long-term basis.
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Their site is down (but with content still?) from too many people visiting, so their app probably is too. I'm guessing they need more hardware to run the virtual machines. $9.5M doesn't go very far these days, I guess.
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I think the link is dead
If you go to Cloudon's website: "CloudOn is currently sold out. We thank you for your support. To receive CloudOn product information and be notified when our next release is available, sign up below"
I think the link is dead
Me thinks iTunes pulled it as I get a message stating the app is'nt available in the US.
Because it's an on-screen keyboard, they keys can change to fit the functions.
Duh.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that MS Office is so bad some users will appreciate the F# keys, but this is taking dumb software UI to a whole new level.
There is no real definition of cloud anything so, yes, it can. Lame. It was originally used to reference generic, agnostic services-- storage, computing, etc., but now it's so nebulous (pun intended) that it can be any kind of server farm or thing you access over the internet.
I'm just wondering what they'll need to price this thing at to make their money back, or maybe they're hoping to get acquired for their innovative technology.
You guys are getting ridiculous.No, browsing the web in general is not considered "cloud computing." However, a site that you visit may be a cloud.
I'll give you another example. Netflix has been well documented to have switched over to using cloud computing and a cloud architecture for their streaming services. If you go to their website and update your queue, watch a movie, or update your account information, then yes, you are engaging in cloud computing because Netflix is gauging the demand of you as well as all of the other customers it has and they are dynamically scaling how many servers they have instantiated automatically (no human involved).
However, if you just browse apple.com, and then go to microsoft.com, and then go to macrumors.com, that is not cloud computing... that is called web surfing.
It has a count-down timer
The counter starts at 2 hours. What would happen when it reaches 0?
Will it roll over every day, week, month or instead require a fee to continue working? How much? Nobody seems to know it now. It must be in the beta stage.
And if several users are experiencing very slow performance, it must be due to the zillion iOS users in the U.S. playing with it.
The counter starts at 2 hours. What would happen when it reaches 0?
Will it roll over every day, week, month or instead require a fee to continue working? How much? Nobody seems to know it now. It must be in the beta stage.
And if several users are experiencing very slow performance, it must be due to the zillion iOS users in the U.S. playing with it.
Priceless.
Were you referring to MS or HP?
LOL. Nice.
I did more research, and the company itself consists mostly of marketing people and investors, but I did find actual software engineers in Israel.
This product could have had a couple not-so-bad years if they actually launched a product back in 2009. Unfortunately for AppToU/CloudOn, 2010 brought the "oh ****" moment when companies realized that the iPad really did strike gold. At that point, software companies started the race to get native apps onto touch platforms-- and now they're here.
The concept of remotely accessible desktop apps seems cool, but there's already a few different apps out there for doing that on your own computer. And now, it's just too late, as Microsoft will have their own mobile apps for other platforms.
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What Netflix does is more of what I consider true cloud computing-- having the same content and services available from any location (a "seamless experience," as Steve would have called it). But these days everyone is throwing around the term "cloud" for anything you access over the internet. I refuse to start referring to web applications, or any ol' server clusters, as clouds. No way.
Grabbed it before it was removed from the App Store. My understanding is that it will be back when they open up more capacity.
I couldn't get a doc to open today, but this evening it worked (seems the initial demand died down a bit). Played around with Word and Excel for a minute and I'm actually pretty impressed.
I've found that this is NOT the same as remotely accessing your PC through the iPad (which I've been doing for over a year). Well, it's mostly the same, but better in a few key areas:
- The UI of each Office app is optimized for tablets. Not to the same degree as a native iOS app, but much better than simple remote access.
- The ribbon toolbars are different - functions are grouped differently and special buttons are included. All of this appears to be optimized for more efficient tablet usage.
- When you pop up the keyboard, the application shrinks to fit in the remaining space. It works well. In regular VPN, the keyboard would simply overlap part of the screen.
- Scrolling and zooming uses standard iOS pinch and drag gestures.
- Highlighting text and cells uses a tap-hold then drag, and a little translucent "target" symbol appears.
Now, I couldn't get the File menu to come up to save a doc. Call this a Beta until they sort out the bugs, and surely they will charge for this in the long run (hence the timer that isn't used at the moment). But it's a very promising start.
I couldn't get a doc to open today, but this evening it worked (seems the initial demand died down a bit). Played around with Word and Excel for a minute and I'm actually pretty impressed.
I've found that this is NOT the same as remotely accessing your PC through the iPad (which I've been doing for over a year). Well, it's mostly the same, but better in a few key areas:
- The UI of each Office app is optimized for tablets. Not to the same degree as a native iOS app, but much better than simple remote access.
- The ribbon toolbars are different - functions are grouped differently and special buttons are included. All of this appears to be optimized for more efficient tablet usage.
- When you pop up the keyboard, the application shrinks to fit in the remaining space. It works well. In regular VPN, the keyboard would simply overlap part of the screen.
- Scrolling and zooming uses standard iOS pinch and drag gestures.
- Highlighting text and cells uses a tap-hold then drag, and a little translucent "target" symbol appears.
Now, I couldn't get the File menu to come up to save a doc. Call this a Beta until they sort out the bugs, and surely they will charge for this in the long run (hence the timer that isn't used at the moment). But it's a very promising start.
Another thing to keep in mind when defining cloud is that of private and public cloud. I won't get into private cloud since we are focused on public cloud.
The key that some are missing in defining cloud, is that it is a service.
One definition:
If the item provided is a service that could be obtained in less centralized way, then I consider it cloud. The cloud provider will manage all infrastructure related to operating that service.
I can't find it on the app store.
I looks like its been pulled for the time being. I downloaded it earlier and just got around to using it. It's really sluggish... meh.. It might not be good for writing an entire work in, but for editing, I think it would do in a pinch.