Tom Gorham
Judging by the number of businesspeople I’ve seen hunched over their iPhones and iPads over the past few weeks, Apple’s iOS devices must shoulder a large part of the blame for this explosion in out-of-office toil.
With iWork for iPad, Apple has been quick to offer tools for this new way of working, but in its early days it wasn’t a realistic option for on-the-road work. Missing features and glitchy behaviour were reasons enough on their own, but for me the rudimentary syncing method – requiring you to connect iPad and desktop Mac and sync through iTunes – was a far bigger drawback.
iWork has certainly upped its game with its latest update, which enables you to sync over the air through MobileMe or any WebDav server. And it’s more Office-compatible, too: you can now export Pages documents in Word format and Numbers to Excel-ready format.
However, the mobile version still isn’t the answer for every mobile worker – or for me. First, it’s only available on the iPad, and even if syncing is easier, it still requires a MobileMe account or access to a WebDav server to sync. What I’d like for a mobile office app is a universal app for iPhone and iPad that could sync without the need for MobileMe and would understand native iWork files.
I’ve looked long and hard for such an app, and none has yet quite fitted the bill.
For a while, I regularly used the free SimpleNote (simplenoteapp.com), which offered web-based online access to documents and was also available as iOS app. That meant I could at least happily tap away on the iPhone version when I needed to. However, with SimpleNote, I couldn’t rely on iWork as my primary authoring system on my Mac and instead had to use a web browser on the Desktop. What I needed was an iPhone and iPad app that would sync happily with my Mac so I could ensure I was always working on the most recent version of my file.
There are now plenty of choices and as well as syncing with MobileMe’s iDisk, many also integrate with Dropbox, a free service that automatically syncs content between your Mac and other Dropbox-enabled clients, whether a PC, iPhone, iPad or web browser.
The choices range from full suites that can edit and sync Office-formatted documents to minimalist text editors.
One of the most capable of these suites is Quickoffice (£2.99 from quickoffice.com), which can edit Word and Excel files, transfer files via wifi and email, and will happily open and save files to MobileMe as well as Google Docs and Dropbox. Documents to Go (£5.99), a universal app for both iPhone and iPad, offers similar features, some of which are only available in its Premium version (£9.99), which also lets you edit presentation files. I found the way it synchronised a bit awkward – it uses its own Mac Desktop application.
Office2 (£3.49 from bytesquared.com), comprising spreadsheet and word processor, doesn’t offer quite the same import options as the others (Word and Excel 97-2003 files only) and lacks a presentation function, but it does sync with WebDav servers and you can directly edit Google Docs, too.
However, there are also simpler applications that concentrate on word processing only. The free, ad-supported PlainText (hogbaysoftware.com/products/plaintext) is a universal app, and the minimalist iPad-only Writer (£2.99 from informationarchitects.jp/en/writer-for-ipad) is a better-looking alternative. Thanks to their ability to synchronise with Dropbox, they both have at least one advantages over Pages for iPad when you’re working with text files.
However, the big problem with these text editors, at least as far as iWork users are concerned, is that while you can open the text files using Pages on the Mac, because Pages doesn’t save natively in any format other than Pages, you have to export the Pages file back to text format. It’s a frustrating limitation – and one that’s the fault of iWork rather than the iOS apps. However, it’s also something that’s possible to work around with a variation of a script I mentioned in an early iWork column for automatically converting Pages documents into Word format.
As the Dropbox folder on your Mac acts like any other Finder folder, it also understands AppleScript folder action scripts, so you can create a script to automatically convert a Pages file saved to the Dropbox folder to a text – or Word – file that can be then be edited with one of those applications on the iPhone. (It should also be possible to do something similar in reverse: saving a file to Dropbox on your iPhone could trigger a folder action on your desktop Mac, even if you’re away from home.)
This is the basic conversion script:
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving
added_items
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in added_items
set this_item to item i of added_items
tell application "Pages"
open this_item
set DocumentName to name of front
document
set oldDelimeters to AppleScript's text item
delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to
".pages"
set DocumentName to first text item of
DocumentName & ".txt"
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to
oldDelimeters
set FilePath to ("/Users/tomgorham/
Dropbox/PlainText/") & DocumentName
save front document as
"SLDocumentTypePlainText" in FilePath
close front document
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to
You’ll have to change the file path reference in the script to suit your own setup – this one is set up to link to the PlainText folder in my Dropbox directory.
Obviously, as the script converts to text, it will remove any formatting from the text. If you wanted to keep the formatting and work with the Word formats produced by Documents to Go or QuickOffice, you’d just change the reference to the file extension to “.doc” and choose to save as “Microsoft Word 97 – 2004 Document” rather than “SLDocumentTypePlainText”. Sadly, I haven’t yet found a way to do the same translation with Numbers or Keynote so can’t script them in the same way.
Until Pages and Numbers let you save natively in other formats, and until iWork becomes available on the iPhone or works more seamlessly with other file syncing tools, there will always be a market for alternatives.
However, the fact that I’m reduced to implementing workarounds are needed is evidence that for Mac iWork users, Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are still the simplest way to work on the move and keep your data synced.
Yes, lack of Dropbox integration is a real flaw, but even here there’s hope. I found a new service, Habilis (gethabilis.com), that offers hope for Pages owners. Once you’ve linked Habilis to your Dropbox account and you send an email to a specific address, it automatically ends up in your Dropbox folder, so this way you can send your Pages or Numbers files.
Access to Google Docs would be good, too. Google is making noises about making Google Docs editable on the iPad. If it does, I hope it’s through helping its small offshoot, Dav-pocket Lab, to develop WebDav server access to Google Docs. You can already access the Dav-pocket Lab server (in the Finder, select Go > Connect to Server and enter dav-pocket.appspot.com/docs, but when I tried it, performance was unworkable. Nevertheless, its promise is immense and would hopefully allow iWork documents to be easily accessed in the cloud.
