Give Byte2 points for candor. A representative of the developer responsible for Office2 HD told me at Macworld | iWorld that Byte2’s iPad-based offie suite has the best word processor in the App Store—after Apple’s Pages, that is.
But Byte2 is hoping to gain some ground on Apple. Recent updates to Office2 HD made it much easier to perform “desktop-style editing,” the company said. For example, you can now place an image in text and drag it around anywhere, with the text flowing around it live. You can adjust the text flow as you see fit. Also new to the app is better handling for semitic languages that you write from right to left.
So if the app offers only the second-best editing experience after Pages, why bother with it at all? Office2’s developers say there are several reasons: First, there’s the $8 price tag (compared to Pages’s $10 cost). But even that price comparison is deceptive, since Office 2 HD actually combines not just a word processor, but also a spreadsheet editor, and a presentation editor, too.
Other recent updates to the app offered improvements for tasks like formatting documents, selecting colors, and using MLA-style formatting.