The reward was announced today. Five teams were selected to implement their ideas. We're glad to announce that DoxBee is one of them. The press release.
To learn more about DoxBee, visit www.doxbee.com

We are removing Appser for Google Docs from the App Store. From now on, you won't be able to download it anymore. 

We know that some of you really loved it. We loved it, too. We needed it. But, there is only that much we can do on top of Google's app. Appser can never become a top-of-the-line product. And what's the point of working on it if it can never get there.  

Therefore we decided it's in everyone best interest to cease development and remove the app from the store. 

On a lighter note, we just updated Presentation Note and are working on some really cool products that will launch later this year. 

Stay tuned!

It's been a while since we wrote about the progress of our project. But, that's only because we've been working hard on new products that use parts of our technology that we originally developed for the DoxOut Office Suite. 

Presentation Note for iPad lets you wirelessly transfer ppt and pdf files, stores them on the iPad's drive and provides easy to use live presenting tools.

This app was published in the Summer, but recently got a major update - complete redesign of the app and the code base and improved display of presentations on the iPad. 

Our mission with this app is that it should help users replace PCs when they need to give a presentation for their stakeholders. 
Download here, and the Lite version is here.

Appser for Google Docs runs the original, web version of Google Docs on the iPad. This app is for those of you who find Google Drive too complicated, lacking features or if you just like the good, old Google Docs right on your iPad. 

This was a real interesting task to tackle, especially since we didn't have access to any of Google's code. How did we do it? By adding a layer that "understands" what actions you want to take. What's especially interesting here is that we can use this technology to make other web apps work on the iPad, too, although we don't have such plans for know. Read more of how we did this here.
 
With this app, we only wanted to show you how we would like Google Docs (or Drive) to be in the future. Who knows, maybe if there are lots us who like this approach, Google will do something about it.

In the meantime, you can download it here. It's free and no ads.   

Full PR
Like Appser for Google Docs on Facebook

Today we're in London for the QPrize semi finals. Actually, they should be starting any moment now. Wish us luck. It's gonna be tough, but we're ready.

Things are getting very exciting here at DoxOut. Most recently, we've been nominated for best BYOD solution on the UP 2012 Cloud Computing Conference held in San Francisco.

This is a great honor for us since we still haven't launched officially, and see this opportunity as a way of acknowledgement for the potential of our idea.

If you like DoxOut, plese give us your vote here.

Stay tuned, we'll be back soon with exciting news.

We are very glad to announce that we've been chosen to be one of the five companies that will present on GigaOM's Structure: Europe 2012 LaunchPad event.

We are very excited to announce that we will be presenting DoxOut at the "one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year" - TechCrunch Disrupt, held in San Francisco, September 10th - 12th. 

DoxOut will be a part of the Startup Alley,  for a chance to win one of the two remaining spots on the main event - Startup Battlefield. So, if you're there, visit our booth and help us with your vote.

More info to follow soon.

UPDATE: DoxOut has been published at TechCrunch. Read the whole story here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/doxout-turns-any-tablet-or-smartphone-into-a-google-docs-pc/
Thanks, 

Completely functional app in one hour!? Read this post by our lead developer Gorgi and learn how our team created DoxOut Presentation for Windows 8 in no time.
Enjoy!  

Lately, HTML5 mobile app development has received a lot of bashing all over the Internet. Most developers only quickly skim over the benefits and proceed to bash all the downsides. The conclusions they usually arrive at: HTML5 is slow, inconsistent, limited and doesn't have a native look and feel. Therefore, native development is superior.

I'm not going to go point by point to defend or debunk these claims today. Instead, I'd like to give an example of the benefits of HTML5.

Here at CreationPal, we make SportyPal - a reasonably popular mobile app that tracks your workouts. Its a native non-trivial app implemented for multiple platforms, so we do have some experience with native technologies.

When we were discussing our new product DoxOut, we concluded that the best way to go is to use HTML5. As a result of this decision, it didn't take much time to port our prototype presentation appto the new Windows 8 UI (formerly codenamed Metro)

The time needed: 1 hour.

How is that possible?

To improve experience, we have a thin native layer for each platform. If a component of the layer is not available, a default HTML5 replacement is provided that works well enough in most browsers. The rest of the code and UI is pure HTML5.

The new Windows 8 UI is all about HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. An application has the same structure as a webpage, with a main html file. What is different is that there are extra "native" libraries available in the global JavaScript namespace which you can use to access native functionality. As a result, it was simply a matter of pointing the app to the relevant HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Well, not quite.

We quickly got the following error:
JavaScript runtime error: Unable to add dynamic content. A script attempted to inject dynamic content, or elements previously modified dynamically, that might be unsafe. For example, using the innerHTML property to add script or malformed HTML will generate this exception. Use the toStaticHTML method to filter dynamic content, or explicitly create elements and attributes with a method such as createElement.  For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=247104.The new Windows 8 UI has a strict html security model. Directly inserting potentially-unsafe HTML is not allowed, and since we are using a jQuery-based micro-templating library that does exactly that, we quickly ran into the error.

This was the offending line in the jQuery code


// ... snip ...
append: function () {      return this.domManip(arguments, true, function (elem) {
             if (this.nodeType === 1) {
                 this.appendChild(elem); 
             }
      });
},
// ... snip ...

We learned quickly that a potential solution is to wrap unsafe execution usingMSApp.execUnsafeLocalFunction :

append: function () { 
        return this.domManip(arguments, true, function (elem) { 
               if (this.nodeType === 1) { 
                   var self = this; 
                   // In Metro, execUnsafeLocalFunction is needed to
                  // append a child which contains arbitrary innerHTML 
                  if (window["MSApp"]) MSApp.execUnsafeLocalFunction(function () {    
                      self.appendChild(elem); 
                  });  
                  else this.appendChild(elem);
                  } 
         });
 },

As this circumvents protection for all jQuery.fn.html calls,  its not an ideal solution. However the alternative involves giving up features such as data-attributes which was unacceptable.

The only remaining modification was to add the Microsoft-specific CSS properties (such as -ms-linear-gradient) to our LESS mixin classes and $.fn.css calls

Note: jQuery 1.8 makes the last practice obsolete: the newest $.fn.css automatically transforms the property to a browser-specific version, if needed.

After this modification the entire codebase worked flawlessly.


Now imagine the time it would take to port a native app to a new platform.


Despite all the negative reputation, HTML5 remains the fastest way to develop multi-platform apps. The quick porting of our DoxOut Presentation prototype is to Windows 8 confirms that (though not exactly a fair example as Metro is already heavily HTML5-based),  And with efforts such as AppJS, the number of OSes that support mixed HTML5-native development keeps growing.

Switch to HTML5, today!

 Update: check the demo video of DoxOut on Win 8 simulator!

A strong opening sentence means everything.

It creates a difference if the listener will be interested in you or your product or they will walk away. So, sometimes this puts a lot of pressure entrepreneurs.

How do you extract the most important information about your project without saying too little?

We've had the same problem. But, recently I found this short 5 minute video that helped me form our opening sentence. So, here is what I came up with:

"My company DoxOut is developing a cross platform office suite integrated with cloud to help people who own both mobile devices and PCs, to view, edit, create and collaborate on documents, from any device they have with them at the moment with complete functionality and unified UI and UX."

 

We believe that we have something extraordinary here.

Just check out the video1 and video2 we made, and you’ll see how great this concept is. I mean, only one app for all your devices. That has to be huge.

But, some people don’t think so.

Every time we demo it to someone, we get a reaction like:

“If this works, it will be the best app ever”. 

“Well, it does work; you can see it with your own eyes. I’m not doing tricks, although the software is magical” - I say. Still, they stare at me with their eyes wide open in disbelief. 

 “No, you must be doing some trick”, they say, “Can I take a look at it?”
 “Sure you can. Just try it yourself. It will be available for everyone soon.” – I replied.

I don’t know why people are skeptic, but I know that we’re on the right track. And we’ll keep pushing this project even harder than before.