As an extension of this morning's news about Google Gears making its way to mobile devices, online office suite Zoho is taking advantage of the new technology to give people a way to view Zoho Writer documents on their Windows mobile phones while away from a data connection. It's the type of situation that occurs frequently for commuters, and something that has historically given native software applications the leg up on their Web counterparts.
Users can view up to 20 of their latest Zoho Writer documents while connected, and view up to the last last five when in the Gears-enabled offline mode. According to CEO Raju Vegesna, an option to change how many documents you can load into the Gears cache is in the works. Also on tap is an offline editing mode to let you make changes or tweaks to your docs, although according to Vegesna more than 90 percent of users simply view documents on their mobile devices.
Zoho was one of the first adopters of Google's Gears technology, adding it to its Writer word processing service back in late November--something Google has still not done with its own Documents and Spreadsheets service, despite hints it was the next service to get the Gears treatment back in January.
Vegesna walks us through the process of installing Gears and accessing the mobile version of Zoho Writer in the video embedded after the break.
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Zoho Writer, one of the most full featured Web alternatives to Microsoft Word, has added a handful of new features this morning. Most notable is the addition of page support and headers, making the application a little friendlier for editing large, multipage documents. While it doesn't have Word's fancy side-by-side and zoom controls, Zoho offers a good way to give your document the once over before printing. Support for headers and footers is simple, letting you add things like page numbers, text, and images to the top and bottom edges of your document.
Writer has also added Chinese language support, and a spell checker in 43 different languages to choose from a drop-down menu. I gave the tool a quick spin with a misspelled word, both in Spanish and French, and it was easily identified with appropriate suggestions for correct spelling.
More info and screen shots can be found on Zoho's blog.
Page view is all new to Zoho Writer (seen on left). People can also check spelling in 43 languages (seen on right)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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