CloudOn, known until today for a virtual Microsoft Office for tablets, has unveiled a mobile co-editor tool for iPad that supports integration with file sync-and-share services (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive and Hightail), as well as in-document sharing and commenting capabilities.

I’ve had a chance to catch up with founders Milind Gadekar and Jay Zaveri in recent weeks, and their vision is grander than simply editing Word docs on an iPad. First of all, with their experience with the CloudOn virtual client allowed them to learn a great deal about what people did with Office tools on their tablets. And they have leveraged that understanding — as well as some deep thinking about touch and gesture — to create a really great experience on the iPad.

Here’s a document on my Mini:

What you can’t see in  a static picture is an example of the flexibility of the editor: for example, the image in the doc can be dragged around with a finger, and the text simply rewraps around it.

The bulleted list near the bottom of the doc — which is a getting started guide provided by CloudOn — enumerates some great gestural design, which makes editing much easier. Instead of tapping and being presented with a draggable test selection, different taps lead to capturing different sized chunks of text, like a single word with one finger doubletap, while a three finger tap selects a paragraph.

A clever pinch-fingers-all-the-way gesture leads to a view of the document as a series of pages:

Note also the styling features on the keyboard, making markup a breeze.

I tested out the integration with Dropbox, and it works like a charm. Here’s an old .doc I had exported from Apple Pages some time ago, and on the right you see the CloudOn sharing panel open, so I could share it.

CloudOn offers a free version with basic features and functionalities, as well as a Pro version with advanced features, support and security for $3.99 per month. You can get access to the Pro features by sharing the news on Twitter or Facebook. The download is available in the iTunes Store.

The Bottom Line

CloudOn’s editor makes me believe that I could finally use the iPad as a serious editing tool, and not just as a consumption device, where I can only really do tiny edits, and leave all serious writing for my laptop. Not any more.

The tool’s intuitive rich interface is easy on the eyes and fingers. Once you learn the four or five new gestures the experience is direct and very responsive.

And the founders’ vision — composite documents made up of individual elements, like tables, images, paragraphs, and a rich gestural support — seems like a way forward, out of the desktop metaphor of documents we’ve been living in for decades.

This looks like the start of something big. If I were Satya Nadella, I’d be on the phone with CloudOn, right now.