Tomorrow marks the start of the much-anticipated Apple World Wide Developers Conference. Rumors of all sorts are flying ahead of the conference, but in the midst of all the hype and hoopla is actually some real news as Zoho and Transmedia Glide have announced brand spankin’ new versions of their online software tuned especially for the iPhone.
Zoho has released a new mobile version called iZoho. You can see some pictures of the various apps by following the link. What’s nice is they have obviously put together a version of the application designed to work in a comfortable way inside the iPhone footprint. You can see a list of the most recent documents. Clicking a document opens it in the iPhone. Unfortunately, the screen shots do not reveal what an open document looks like. It’s one thing to list files. It’s another to read it and another level altogether to be able to edit inside a device the size of the iPhone, and what will be interesting is how Zoho deals with these issues. For now, it’s good to know they are thinking about the problem and creating applications that make sense on a small screen.
Transmedia released Glide 3.0 last week with the promise of cross-platform synchronization for the iPhone. They describe it in their press release thusly:
Glide Syncs the 3G iPhone with Windows, Solaris, Linux and Apple Computers and Android, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile Phones. Files edited on these computers and phones are automatically synchronized. Glide's synchronization solution is the first to not only bi-directionally synchronize files across all platforms but to provide automated version control and file transcoding based on device recognition for cross platform compatibility.
As I’ve written in this space before, being able to seamlessly synchronize the mobile and desktop worlds is a key goal for users, and something Microsoft is attempting to do with its Mesh platform (as I wrote in Perhaps I Misjudged Microsoft as the Mesh Platform Shows). The fact it can do that today gives Transmedia a big leg up, but it remains to be seen if Transmedia can take advantage of the window of opportunity it has while Microsoft is still in the early stages of developing its platform. Glide has actually offered the ability to link the desktop and the mobile device with a common backend for some time and the new release refines that process further and makes it available for more devices, not just the iPhone, across more platforms.
Not to be left out, Google has updated the Google Reader for the iPhone. The Google Reader, like the iZoho apps takes advantage of the foot print and makes it easy to cycle through a list of articles you subscribe to. GMail on the first generation iPhone was one of the early examples of how to take an online application and transform it for a mobile device.
There is little doubt that news will be flying out of San Francisco tomorrow when Steve Jobs gives his keynote address, but for now, perhaps these little news tidbits can satisfy your curiosity while you wait for the big announcements.