In the previous blog post, we introduced DocsPortal, our new app for accessing your Google Docs files on the iPad.  In this post, we’ll dive a bit deeper, and look at the issue of using DocsPortal to have the iWork apps edit your Google Docs documents.

Importing and exporting from iWork apps

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use the import/export features of DocsPortal to use the iWork apps to edit the documents you have in Google Docs?  We think so too, but unfortunately the iWork apps are limited in their ability to export files.  Numbers and Keynote won’t even export files in the formats supported by DocsPortal (they will only save as Numbers, Keynote, or PDF formats).  Pages, however, CAN save in the Microsoft Word format (.doc), but unfortunately it can only use this format to save as an email attachment, or for iTunes syncing…it cannot export to other apps.  However, there is an interesting workaround that is possible, described below.

Exporting Pages files to DocsPortal – the hard way

OK, so you can easily export a Google Docs document file to Pages, and Pages will import it and let you edit it.  That’s great.  But now that you’ve edited it, how do you export it back to DocsPortal so it gets uploaded to Google Docs?  Well, as described in the section about, there is no direct way, but it is possible.  The secret is to use Pages to e-mail the document to yourself in the .doc format.  Even though Pages can’t export the document, it can e-mail it, and then when you receive the e-mail, you can easily export the attachment back to DocsPortal like you would any other e-mail attachment.  Inconvenient?  Yes.  But it works in a pinch.

I’m pleased to introduce the latest Kabuki Vision app in the app store – DocsPortal.  DocsPortal is designed to let you quickly and easily view, browse, and search your Google Docs files right on your iPad. Let’s dig into the features!

File Navigation

DocsPortal makes browsing and searching for files easy.

The DocsPortal screen is divided into two main parts, the Navigation View, shown above on the right, and the Folder View, shown above on the left.

The Navigation View lets you navigate through your folders and browse the file lists.  For each file, you can quickly see at a glance, the name, type, and update date of the file.  Files lists can be sorted by title, date, or type.

The Folder View shows a list of ALL folders in your Google Docs account.  Tapping on a folder name will cause the Navigation View to immediately switch to a view of the contents of that folder.  Use the Folder View to quickly jump to different folders without having to navigate through them.

At the top of the screen also exists the Search Bar which lets you search for any file or folder using Google’s full text search.

File Viewing

View the contents of any file.

To view the contents of a file, just tap on it from the list in the Navigation View.  The file or document will be shown, along with additional details about the file.

From the file view, there are multiple actions you can take by using the toolbar right above the document.

• Open in… Open this file using another app that can support it.  For example, you could open a document file using Apple’s Pages app for further editing.
• E-mail. Create a new e-mail with this file as an attachment.
• Full screen. View the current file in a full screen view.

Offline Access

One of the great things about DocsPortal is that it will automatically download and cache your files so that they can be viewed even when you don’t have an internet connection.  Whenever you do have an internet connection, DocsPortal will automatically sync with Google Docs so that you always have the latest file updates on your iPad.

All of this happens automatically…no messy setup required, and no need to manually “download” the files that you want to access offline.

Importing and Exporting

DocsPortal makes it simple to import and export files to and from other apps.

Exporting

Exporting files to other apps.

While viewing a file, you can use the “Open in…” toolbar button to show a list of other apps that can handle opening files of this type.  Tap on an app name to launch that app and open the file.  In the screenshot above, you can see that this document file can be exported to the Pages app.

Importing

Import files from other apps.

DocsPortal also support importing certain file types into Google Docs.  Documents (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .html, .txt), spreadsheets (.xls, xlsx), presentations (.ppt, pptx), and PDF files are supported for importing.  Any app that can support exporting its files in one of these formats can be used.  For example, if you receive an e-mail with a Excel (.xls) spreadsheet attachment, you could tap on the attachment, and choose DocsPortal to open it.

When importing a file, DocsPortal will open with the simple import screen shown above.  From this screen you can choose to rename the file or choose its destination folder before importing it.  After tapping save, the file will be imported into DocsPortal and uploaded to Google Docs.

Conclusion

If you’re a Google Docs user with an iPad, i hope you’ll try DocsPortal.  We have plans to add a lot of new features in future updates.  Have an idea for a new feature?  Go to our support page and let us know!

DocsPortal is now available on the app store.

UPDATE (4/26/2010): I have word that the Google Docs team has read this post, has a fix for the problem, and will deploy it soon. Great news!

In this blog post I’ll address the current problems with NoteMaster syncing with Google Docs.  While I’ve already posted some info on our support page, I wanted to share some additional details about the problem with our customers.

To recap, there is a syncing issue with Google Docs, where notes that are uploaded to Google Docs have missing images.  Since image support is one of NoteMaster’s main selling points, this problem is especially frustrating.

When uploading documents to Google Docs, Google supports a number of file formats, such as plain text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), Word (.doc), Open Office (.odt), and HTML (.html).  When NoteMaster syncs a note to Google Docs, it needs to use one of these formats to upload the note.  Of these, the only ones that support headers and images (two important NoteMaster features) are .doc, .odt, and .rtf.  We chose to use .odt because it is a relatively simple, well-documented, modern format to use.

The current issue is that Google has broken the conversion of .odt file uploads.  Completely.  In fact, this is not just for NoteMaster, this is a general issue…even uploading .odt files to Google Docs with your web browser will result in a broken document.

You can prove this to yourself by doing the following:

1. Create a new document in Google Docs that contains text, headers, and images
2. Export this document to your computer in .odt format
3. Re-upload the document back to Google Docs
4. Open the uploaded document and notice two things: the text is missing, and the image looks weirdly lo-res (posterized). (Yes, this is screwed up in a different way than when uploading through NoteMaster, but that’s because we create the .odt slightly differently than Google.)

So you can see that .odt conversion is completely broken. It’s hard to believe that Google would let a basic feature like this stay broken for several week now, isn’t it? Yet that is exactly the situation we are facing. This exact same issue happened at the end of January, and I reported it, and they fixed it. So when I saw it happening again I knew it was the same problem. I have reported it again, but this time they don’t seem to be even looking at it…very frustrating indeed.

At the beginning of this week I got tired of waiting for Google, and I decided to try using one of the other formats for uploading notes to Google. Unfortunately, while .doc is probably the format Google supports the best, it is also the most complicated, proprietary, and undocumented. So I tried to use .rtf instead. The good news is that I had some success, it was able to upload notes with images. The bad news is that it wasn’t consistently successful…about 30% of the time you would end up with the lo-res/posterized images, and and although the text was there, any international (non-english) characters were lost. While this certainly is an improvement of sorts, I’m extremely hesitant to put out an update that claims to fix the images problem, when it still doesn’t work 100%.

So at this point I’m going to continue down two paths at once. First, I’m going to keep banging on Google’s door until I can get some sort of answer as to what’s going on with their .odt support. Second, I’m going to keep playing around with the .rtf format to see if it stabilizes.

I realize this blog post is going to come across as somewhat of a rant.  You might be surprised to know that this kind of thing happens all the time with Google Docs, only usually it’s not this bad, and usually it gets fixed a lot sooner.  Normally I try to shield our customers from the gritty details of Google breakage, because I realize that you don’t really care why it’s broken, you only want it fixed.  But this problem has been going on a few weeks now, and I thought our customers deserved a bit more information.

Hey guess what?  Kabuki Vision has just released a new app and I’d like to tell you a bit about it.

Our new app is called Smooth Movie, and its job is to smooth out any shaky videos you record on your iPhone 3GS.  What do I mean by “shaky videos”?  Well, when you’re recording video on your iPhone, it’s hard to keep your hand super steady, especially if you are moving around at all.  This results in videos that look shaky.  Smooth Movie can process these videos, analyze the frames of the video, and create a “smoothed” version.  The camera movement will still be there, but it will be a lot less jerky, and a lot less distracting to the viewer.

So, how does Smooth Movie accomplish this?  We implemented an image stabilization algorithm which analyzes each frame of the movie, and tries to figure out how much the frame has moved relative to the previous frame.  It then adjusts the position and rotation of the frame in a way that minimizes the apparent movement.  There are many computer programs that do similar things…iMovie for the Mac can do this, for example.  But Smooth Movie is the first piece of software that can do this on the iPhone itself, which is much more convenient.  For example, you could shoot some video, run Smooth Movie on it, and then upload the result to YouTube, all on your iPhone.

Smooth Movie does take some time to process and smooth a movie, which is why we recommend it for short clips, rather than long movies.  We spent a lot of time optimizing the code to be as fast as it can be, including taking advantage of the NEON intrinsics that are available in the armv7 processor of the iPhone 3GS.

We hope you’ll enjoy Smooth Movie.  It really is useful for almost all handlheld videos taken on the iPhone 3GS.  And if you find it useful for your own needs, please tell you friends, and please consider writing a review on the app store.

On our Smooth Movie page, you can check out some sample movies that were processed with Smooth Movie.

So, only three blog posts in, and I’ve already started lagging.  So I thought it was about time to post a little update about what’s been going on at Kabuki Vision.

NoteMaster

In December, we released NoteMaster 3.1, and even though it was just a “.1″ update, it had a lot of cool stuff in it.  The focus of the release was user interface improvements, so we took the opportunity to add some features that would make NoteMaster easier to use.  Here’s an overview of what it contained:

• Added a “new note” button to the category screen so you can quickly add a note from any screen (yay!).
• Added an option to allow NoteMaster to launch to the screen it was on when you exited the app (finally!)
• Added the ability to preview the first three lines of your note right from the note list (helpful!).
• Greatly improved the speed of the note search, especially for large note lists (speedy!).
• New easy setup for Google Docs syncing and SMTP e-mail (easy!)
• Lots of other small tweaks and improvements to make NoteMaster more usable.

We’re currently working on the next update.  While the feature list is not yet set in stone, I can give you a little hint…think “lists”.

iPad Fever

Yes, I admit that I was one of those people who spent most of the month of January in anticipation of Apple’s “tablet” announcement, which turned out to be the iPad.  While I know a lot of people were a bit disappointed about some elements of the iPad, I wasn’t one of those people.  I’m very excited about it, as both a customer and developer, and rest assured I’ll be at the Apple store on launch day.

I’ve received a number of emails asking if we’re going to make a version of NoteMaster for the iPad.  The easy part of the answer is “yes”…there will certainly be a iPad native NoteMaster.  We’re still in the planning stages, so its too early to reveal exactly what the iPad version of NoteMaster will turn out to be.  We could certainly just whip together something that’s “NoteMaster, only bigger”, but we’re trying to look at the bigger picture a bit.  We’re asking ourselves what does “note taking” mean on a device like the iPad?  After all, we’re talking about a device where a full-featured word processor (iWork Pages) will be available.  The type of “notes” you’ll want to take on the iPad may be very different from the ones you take on the iPhone.  So, yes, NoteMaster for iPad is coming, and we’ll disclose more info when we have it.

One more tidbit…the iPad has inspired us to start planning another app here at Kabuki Vision…more hints about that in future posts!