I have been on the road a lot for the last 10 days, which means that I have had to work with quite a few Word documents, and even a few Excel documents, on my iPad. The new Office apps from Microsoft have worked really well for me and I continue to be impressed. Microsoft announced yesterday that 12 million people have downloaded the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps (most people would download all three, so I guess that means about 4 million users so far). Macworld has good reviews of the new apps (Jeffery Battersby: Word; Rob Griffiths: Excel; Joe Kissell: PowerPoint) and Julio Ojeda-Zapata offers a good overview of all three apps for TidBITS. I don’t care that much about PowerPoint, but Excel is useful, and the Word app is the best new app on my iPad in a very long time. And now, the recent iOS news of note:
- I saw South Carolina attorney Jenny Stevens working hard at TECHSHOW to find every cool swag item being given away by a vendor in the Exhibit Hall. The result was a post on The Mac Lawyer called The Best Swag from ABA TECHSHOW.
- California attorney David Sparks reviews a USB cable from Skiva that has both a Lightning connector and a Micro USB connector.
- South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn of iPad Notebook lists the new improvements to Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps.
- Jesse Landin of Law Technology News discusses apps with information on construction contracts, maritime emergencies and craft beer.
- Briana Boyington of US News mentions 11 apps for law students.
- John Edwards of Law Technology News discusses 12 iOS research apps.
- Serenity Caldwell of Macworld reviews the Pocket Tripod, a piece of plastic the size of a business card that creatively unfolds into an iPhone tripod.
- David Pogue of Yahoo Tech has tips for recovering space on your iPhone.
- Leah Yamshon of Macworld reviews iPhone cases that add features to your iPhone.
- Andy Ihnatko of The Chicago Sun-Times reviews the new Microsoft Office for iPad.
- Daisuke Wakabayashi of the Wall Street Journal shares stories of the development of the iPhone told by Greg Christie, a former Apple senior software engineer.
- Jeffery Battersby of Macworld reviews PDFpen for iOS.
- And finally, here is a fun video created by EasyExplainVideo that takes the audio from the 2007 introduction of the iPhone by Steve Jobs and adds new graphics to it. (via The Mac Observer)