Roger Fingas
BitTorrent on Tuesday released the first iOS version of Bleep, its secure messaging app, while Microsoft updated its flagship Office iOS apps with a handful of new features.
BitTorrent Bleep
Bleep requires as little as a nickname to get started, and transmits messages, images, and voice chat directly between users, instead of through cloud servers. BitTorrent also promises end-to-end encryption with keys saved locally on users' devices.
New to the iOS app and the latest Mac, Windows, and Android Bleep clients is Whisper mode. Similar to Snapchat, this causes photos and messages to vanish 25 seconds after they're sent. To deter people from taking screenshots, usernames are blurred out during chats until a user taps an eye icon, which then blurs message history.
People wanting to find friends using Bleep can add a phone number or email address to their account, or search for users' unique Bleep keys. The app should come to the iOS App Store later today.
Office for iOS
Microsoft's latest Office for iOS updates are minor in scope, but add a few new features worth noting. Word received an assortment of new templates, while Excel gained support for "add-ins," which can expand the functionality of spreadsheets. The latter requires an iPad running iOS 8.2 or later, however.
PowerPoint was granted two new features. With the updated app, users can change an individual slide's layout and insert directly-captured photos and videos into presentations.
The three apps are all free downloads for iPhones and iPads running iOS 7.1 or later.
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6 Comments
Microsoft Office updates are more than 'minor in scope'. It finally allows you to open, edit and save documents to cloud solutions other than OneDrive and Dropbox. iCloud and Box are prime examples, but you can also access anything else installed on you iPad - I can see Creative Cloud, Google Drive and Transmit. This is big news for business and will allow us to use iPads as true replacements for laptops. With Box our employees have full access to all their files and can actually work with all their documents. Services like CloudOn were OK, but the iOS office apps are much better.
It would be nice if one of the Excel 'add-ins' were named regions for Vlookups.
Sounds like a pretty good update!!! To bad I don't use Office much other then some Excel at work and I mainly only use that to create Purchase Orders of things I or someone else needs. I don't think that will be lasting much longer, as we slowing move to some other software which at some point I'll start using myself.
MS is going to do anything and everything to get people to stick with Office for everything. Windows is not that much of a money maker, it's OFFICE where MS makes the most money from. I'm sure they don't want Google or anyone else cutting into that business. Get it out on the different platforms so it works on everything. It's a pretty smart move. Office sales is office sales, Platform isn't as big of a deal. They have always been more of a Software company with some hardware thrown in.
They call it Bleep because that's what the NSA is saying right now.....that and "Think of the children!"
[quote name="JBDragon" url="/t/186233/bittorrents-bleep-secure-chat-comes-to-ios-microsoft-adds-features-to-core-ios-office-apps#post_2722751"]Sounds like a pretty good update!!! To bad I don't use Office much other then some Excel at work and I mainly only use that to create Purchase Orders of things I or someone else needs. I don't think that will be lasting much longer, as we slowing move to some other software which at some point I'll start using myself. MS is going to do anything and everything to get people to stick with Office for everything. Windows is not that much of a money maker, it's OFFICE where MS makes the most money from. I'm sure they don't want Google or anyone else cutting into that business. Get it out on the different platforms so it works on everything. It's a pretty smart move. Office sales is office sales, Platform isn't as big of a deal. They have always been more of a Software company with some hardware thrown in. [/quote] The issue is Microsoft needed to get Office Everywhere in 2012, not 2014. It's going to be a uphill battle at this point.