Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/06/27/review_iphone_app_docs_to_go/

DataViz Documents To Go 1.0

Palm OS veteran comes to the iPhone

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 27th June 2009 09:02 GMT

iPhone App Review DataViz's Documents To Go, born out of the file-translation tools the company made for the Mac nearly two decades ago, has been a mainstay of Palm OS devices for almost as long. That mix of Mac heritage and mobility made it seem inevitable that DTG would come to the iPhone.

And now, at last, it has. Well, sort of. What DataViz has released is a feature-incomplete version of DTG that's really more public beta than finished product. True, the company is offering the app for a reduced price - until 30 June - and has pledged to provide buyers with a free update when the app's complete - ditto - but we're not sure we like this notion of charging for unfinished work, whoever does it.

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Dataviz' Docs To Go: makes the most of the iPhone UI

DTG 1.0 will let you view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. You can also create and edit Word documents, but doing the same with Excel and PowerPoint won't be possible until DTG 1.1 is released. The current version will also let you view PDFs. You can view Apple iWork documents too, but only from last year's version - iWork 09, which has been out for months now, is not supported.

Even with the iPhone's reasonably large display, editing Office documents isn't easy. DataViz has implemented its own cut'n'paste mechanism that's fiddly to use. It works using the iPhone's text lens - you keep it held down until it vibrates and you can select the zoomed characters. But it's easy to move your thumb a wee bit too far, trigger a scroll and select the wrong text or too much. It's not a patch on iPhone OS 3.0's own pasteboard system, and we hope DataViz swaps over soon, if only to allow text copied in DTG to be used in other apps - here you can't do that.

Documents To Go

The free desktop sync app works well

Still, DataViz has implemented a full selection of Word-style text formatting tools, conveniently located in a scrollable toolbar at the bottom of the screen. The company has done a good job at cramming DTG's tools into the limited space on offer.

You can access files kept solely on the iPhone and, separately, those that live on both the handset and your computer. The two devices are kept in sync with free Mac OS X and Windows apps that DataViz lets you download when you've registered DTG. Files - folders too - are transferred over Wi-Fi after you've paired desktop app and iPhone.

Not sure which group a given document belongs too? DTG provides a search tool to help you find the file you want. But moving a file from one group to the other involves opening it and navigating several iPhone pages to manually save the file into the relevant folder.

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Editor vs viewer: Word (left) and Numbers

We tried DTG with a range of supported files and noticed a number of small inconsistencies between original and DTG-viewed versions of the same document. DTG worked best with Word, but here's why: so far as we can see, only Word files are rendered using DTG code. All the rest are displayed using the iPhone OS' own viewers, the same ones employed to view attachments in Mail, for instance.

The result is not only inconsistencies between documents but between document types too. The pinch-to-zoom works well with, say, a PDF but not with a Word document - you use DTG's toolbar-placed magnify icon for that.

So while the Word 'module' lets you do more with the contents of the file, ironically it's the least iPhone-like of the lot. DTG has a muddled feel as a result.

This is all about the unfinished nature of the app. There are a host of document sync-and-view apps out there - File Magnet is a good one - so what DTG really needs is editing tools, but here they're limited to one type of file.

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Where'd the Done button go? And what's up with the search system?

Then there are the inevitable pre-release bugs: a Word search facility that didn't file 'hole' in 'rabbit-hole' even though both whole-word searching and case-sensitivity were disabled. We tried to delete a couple of the pre-loaded sample documents and the Done button didn't appear leaving us with the only option of quitting the app.

Verdict

We've always liked DTG as a viewer and editor on the Palm platform, but this release is very disappointing. DataViz still has a lot of work to do to fill out the feature list - get the editing going, essentially - and polish up the many rough edges. It really should have waited before putting DTG on the App Store - or at least not charged downloaders for the privilege of beta-testing its software. We expect the finished version will score will, but this half-baked offering won't. ®