Thursday 2 January 2014

Playing with Roll.app

Over the holidays I tweeted a link to a Document Foundation press release to the effect that you could now use Roll.app to use Libre Office from a Chromebook or an iPad.
Just to be different I tried it with both Firefox and the native Android browser on my seven inch tablet, and it certainly doesn’t work on Android. However it does work quite nicely with Chrome on a Mac

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Essentially Roll.app is an application hosting service that lets you access an application via your browser. Libre Office is just one of a range of open source applications and tools. Storage is provided via Google Docs, Dropbox and the like.

In use Libre Office was fast and responsive and I have no reason to expect it would be any different of a chromebook.

They have a 14 day free trial period after which it’s USD0.99 per app per month, or if you want to put up with annoying video ads, you can use the free service after your 14 day trial is up.
The obvious use case is when you are working on a complicated document and a basic text editor would not do. It does of course also assume reasonable connectivity and bandwidth …
Written with StackEdit.

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