Macworld/iWorld may extend into a weekend these days, but there were plenty of productivity-focused iOS apps on display at this year’s show to keep your mind on the work day.
Recosoft showed off a new version of PDF2Office for iPad. The app, which converts PDFs complete with formatting and images to editable formats, aims to put a touch-friendly face on PDF conversion. For instance, the app allows you to drag a marquee over a portion of a PDF and tap to choose to send via email. It then converts that portion of the PDF to editable text and places it into the body of an email message.
PDF2Office comes in three versions: the $15 PDF2Office for iWork converts to Apple iWork formats, while the $15 PDF2Office Office for Business converts to Microsoft Office formats. A $3 Lite version converts PDFs to text and RTF formats only.
Backblaze introduced a new iPhone app that works with its backup service for Mac and Windows computers. The app lets users log into their accounts from their iPhones to browse and preview all their backed up files (including those on external drives), as well as download files up to 30MB. They can play videos and music files, tweet images, and more. The app, due out by the end of the month, will be free for subscribers of the $5 per month service.
Meanwhile, Byte Squared previewed the next version of Office2 HD, the company’s $8 tool for editing Microsoft Office documents on the iPad. Due out by the end of the month, this update improves stability, adds an auto save feature, and (especially important to PowerPoint and Excel users) improves rendering of charts and “smartart” objects as well as shapes. The company has also increased the number of cloud services the app works with.
One final note on the update front: Theory.io shared updates to its $7 iPad note-taking app ProjectBook. The company has improved natural-language tools that index your notes in real-time, allowing you to find and connect notes on the same subject. Theory.io also sped up the app’s sketching features to make it easier for ProjectBook users to add drawings, formulas, or hand-written annotations to their notes.