Microsoft Document Editor for Apple iPhone

DataViz, makers of Documents To Go, a Microsoft Office editor app for mobile devices, has confirmed that they are developing an application for the iPhone. The application would allow for editing of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPhone, or, presumably, your iPod Touch. According to a company representative, the application will likely be available in early 2009.

Documents To Go is popular smartphone software that runs on the Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian platforms. Once installed, it allows for viewing and editing Microsoft Office files. Although you can’t do everything that you could do with Microsoft Office desktop software, the Documents To Go app allows for several editing techniques from the basic (cut/copy/paste, spell check, replace/replace all, etc.) to the more advanced (font effects, paragraph alignment, insert charts/tables/comments, cell formatting, track changes, etc.). Those more advanced formatting abilities are available in the premium version of the program, but both it and the standard version are paid applications.

However, it’s unknown at this time if the iPhone version of the Documents To Go application will function exactly the same as its predecessors. The company would not confirm anything else beyond the fact that they are indeed working working on an application and that they expect it to be available in early 2009.

(source)

Google Earth on Apple’s iPhone

Announced on Sunday, the application allows users of Apple’s handset as well as those of the iPod Touch to zoom in and out of a virtual globe. Google Earth has been available on the desktop for three years, and has been downloaded more than 400 million times, but the iPhone deployment marks its first mobile version.

The closest comparative product for mobile phones is Google Maps for Mobile (GMM), which focuses more on localised street mapping and less on a visual reproduction of the earth’s topography. GMM is already available on the iPhone and most other mobile platforms.

According to a blog post by Peter Birch, product manager for Google Earth, the iPhone’s touch interface allows a user to “swipe [their] finger across the screen and… fly to the other side of the globe”, while the in-built accelerometers make it possible to adjust the viewing angle by tilting the phone. Zooming in is achieved in much the same way as it is in using the iPhone’s browser: by pinching fingers together on the screen.

Also included in the iPhone version of Google Earth is the ‘My Location’ feature, which takes the user to their current location, and the geo-located Panoramio photos that desktop users can already see when they use Google Earth.

The handset version of Google Earth is available now as a free download through the iPhone App Store.

(source: zdnet)