Sky has united its live streaming and download package for Apple devices and laptop-owning PC users under the umbrella term 'Sky Go'. But this hasn't been solely a rebranding exercise.

Each subscriber can now watch the (SD only) service on a maximum of two devices at once, plus an Xbox 360 or Fetch TV box if required.

This may seem stingy, especially if you have several family members wanting to watch Sky at the same time, but you can 'swap out' devices as you go, via the web. Sky says it regards this as being adequate for most users but is considering raising the limit.

Once again, what you can watch is dependent on your TV subscription if you have one (in which case Sky Go is free). Non-subscribers can take out a 'monthly ticket' subscription directly via the Sky Go website with prices starting at £15. Apple mobile users must download a free app from the iTunes store.

PC and Mac viewers can log in through the Sky Go website and watch it via their web browser (you're required to have Microsoft Silverlight installed). Sky also provides a free Sky Go desktop application for managing downloads. There's no Android version yet – we're told it could appear by the end of the year.

As before, PC/Mac users can stream live channels they subscribe to from a list of 32 that includes Sky Sports 1-4, Sky1, MTV, Nat Geo and four Sky Movies channels. The PC/Mac interface remains largely unchanged.

You can choose from a list of channels or browse an EPG. On-demand shows appear in the Anytime+ menu and downloads are handled progressively (so can be watched while being downloaded). Typically, TV shows must be watched within seven days and films within 30.

Licensing issues mean that only a few channels (Sky Sports 1-4, four Sky Movies channels, Sky News, ESPN included) can be streamed to Apple devices with no downloading.

The Sky Go App is essentially a stripped-down, touch-enhanced version of its Mac/PC counterpart. Channels are listed on the main page with the live stream displayed in preview form in the top right. Tapping this brings up the fullscreen version. A now-and-next EPG is adequate for streaming.

Using a 2MB 3G connection on an iPad results were jerky and blocky, although 3G usage restrictions mean this won't be an option for many. Using 2MB Wi-Fi on an iPad and PC laptop, however, brought smooth results.

Verdict

Any VoD service stands and falls as much on what's on offer as how easy it is to access (as it is here). Hopefully, deals can be closed soon to make Sky Go more attractive to Apple acolytes.

Microsoft has dabbled in online collaboration before. The SharePoint service might not have set the world alight, but it was a dependable package.

Microsoft Office 365 unites SharePoint with the online version of Microsoft Office – Office Web Apps.

Since the launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has been more focused than ever on smartphones, and its renewed interest in this market has led to some useful smartphone integration.

The 2010 versions of Microsoft Exchange and Lync are also included, offering good features for small businesses.

Tying it all together

Office 365 is aimed at small businesses that might not have dedicated IT staff, so the ease with which its advanced features can be set up and configured is highly commendable.

There are short video tutorials that helped us set up Office 365 much faster than we ever managed with SharePoint. When signing up for the service, we were given a '.onmicrosoft.com' domain name. Importing an existing domain name is pretty simple, and worth doing if you want to incorporate Office 365 with your existing company site and email.

If you don't already have your own website, Office 365 comes with a simple site builder. We were able to make a reasonable looking site in a few minutes using the included templates, stock photos and clipart. The websites you make with this won't win any design awards, but they look good enough and, most importantly, are easy to create.

The Microsoft Exchange 2010 service is the most complicated of the services to set up, and probably the most important to get right, but it means you can send and receive emails, and share calendars and contacts. These can be accessed through a desktop email program, via a smartphone or through Outlook Web Access – a pared-down web version of Outlook.

Outlook Web Access 2010 includes some handy updates, like a faster, more responsive interface and improved support for browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Ease of use

We had Office 2010 software installed on our test machines, and we were able to configure them to interact with 365 by clicking the 'Set up' button in the 'Downloads' section. This downloaded and installed a number of updates that let us use our desktop applications with 365 – saving documents straight from Word to the online SharePoint server, for example.

As you might expect from Microsoft, we had to install several updates, with some updated programs then requiring other programs to be updated, and so on. It wasn't the smoothest of operations, but it was a good time-saver when used with multiple PCs.

It does mean that you need to have Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 installed; if you don't, some of the most useful functions will be lost.

It's clear that Microsoft Office 365 has been optimised to work with devices running Windows, Microsoft Office and Windows Phone 7. If your business uses OS X, Google Docs or Android smartphones, Google Apps offers more choice.

Microsoft Office 365 has had through lengthy beta testing, and with Microsoft's experience in developing office software, the resulting service strikes a good balance between power, features and simplicity. It offers much the same functionality as Google Apps, with the same 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee, and is just a little more expensive.

Microsoft Office 365 is more streamlined, with its services integrating much better than Google's various products. If your small business already uses Microsoft Office products then this is an excellent accompaniment, though if you don't want to be tied to Microsoft products, Google Apps offers far more flexibility.

There aren't many science guys out there who'll argue that humans evolved to sit at desks, typing away at keyboards and bathing themselves in the glow of monitors. In fact, recent studies claim this lifestyle is extremely bad for you and you should at the very least take regular breaks from your hallowed sitting position.

BreakTime is an app that can give you these reminders and, optionally, force you to step away from the keyboard.

In use, BreakTime reminds us a lot of The Iconfactory's Take Five: after you define time settings (for gaps between breaks and length of breaks), the app gets out of your way. Then, 10 seconds before a break is due, a sleek countdown window appears under BreakTime's menu-bar item.

You can use a slider to delay the break, if you wish; otherwise, the screen dims and the BreakTime countdown begins, signalling your window of opportunity to grab that cuppa.

Using the app's preferences, you can optionally have it 'enforce' your break by disabling the Mac OS X app switcher and any early use of the countdown window's Done button.

If you're insanely busy, there are escape paths - the window has delay timers of its own (for one, five and 15 minutes), and you can always quit the app using Command+Q.

We really like BreakTime - rather like Take Five, BreakTime does a simple thing really elegantly, with very little intrusion. It's also light on the system and light on your wallet, and it's therefore pretty much perfect for anyone who rarely remembers to take regular breaks from office tasks. And we bet that's most of you.

Mention Nisus Writer to a Mac user of a certain vintage, and they're likely to go all dewey-eyed and start muttering things like "Remember Compact?" and "Lovely macros!".

It's a powerful word processor with a long and illustrious heritage. The move to OS X a decade ago, however, meant that the developers had to go back to the drawing board. They regrouped and brought out Nisus Writer Express, a simple word processor (more a souped-up TextEdit than a cut-down Word, and none the worse for that) then introduced its big brother, Nisus Writer Pro.

And now we have Nisus Writer Pro 2, which adds more features and further consolidates Nisus's position as a credible alternative to Apple's Pages and Microsoft Word, even for power users.

In fact, while you can treat even Nisus Writer Pro 2 as 'TextEdit with knobs on', you could argue that it's actually a far more powerful and flexible word processor, and one that can be better customised to suit your particular needs and style of working, than the behemoth that is Word. It's clean, fast, stable and can be personalised in many ways.

Nisus's traditional strengths are there too – its crazily powerful Find and Replace, and its macro system, to name just two. But there are lots of new features to tempt upgraders and new users alike.

It gains support for Track Changes, making it easy to collaborate on documents, add comments and review changes made by other team members. It's not without fault: though it can happily open DOC and DOCX formats so you can share files with Word-using colleagues on both Mac and PC, it converts them on opening, forcing a slightly awkward round-trip if you're pinging the same document back and forth. (Nisus's default file format is the widely supported RTF; annoyingly, while Word opens RTFs with Track Changes turned on, Pages only seems to accept Track Changes in DOC/DOCX.)

Writer Pro 2 also adds some simple drawing tools – shapes, lines, floating text boxes – in a nod towards basic desktop publishing abilities. It would be foolish to think of it as a DTP package, however; Pages is much better for DTP, though it's a weaker word processor than Writer Pro 2.

One small but welcome feature is an easy way to add special characters to your documents. You can customise one of the panels in the Tooldrawer to suit.

As well as some additional formatting and style options such as paragraph-level borders, shading, and document watermarks, this new version builds on its predecessor's rich tools for building structured documents by adding the ability to export PDFs (with clickable links for cross-references, tables of contents and more) and EPUB. You'll need to tinker to get the EPUB export right, such as for viewing/selling on iOS's iBooks app; nevertheless, it's good to have the option.

It's a very different beast to apps such as iA Writer: it has similar complexity, power, and flexibility to Microsoft Word, with none of the bloat or – to some – irritating automation.

If you write long or complex documents, collaborate with others, or just want a clean, elegant word processor that you can customise to suit how you work, you should at least try the demo of Nisus Writer Pro 2 on your MacFormat disc.

Long thought to have been abandoned by its developer, The Hit List suddenly appeared on the Mac App Store early in June.

When the app first entered its public preview, back in January 2009, it quickly became a favourite of many. Lightweight, intuitive, powerful and yet less complicated than some similar applications, it makes getting through your to-do list an elegant and enjoyable experience.

Among the features that really put The Hit List on top is its tabbed view, which allows you to open individual lists, tags or folders in separate tabs.

You can focus in even further by switching to Card View, which shows one item at a time; it's also great if you need to add notes to a task (including dropping in files and reference materials).

As with many other task management apps, you get a quick entry window so you can add items from anywhere without needing to foreground the app. There's a clever timer if you need to track exactly how long you spend on a task or project.

Tagging uses a quick text-based system (just append /tag after your task for a general tag, or @tag for location-based tags). And, best of all, The Hit List is full of handy keyboard shortcuts, making it easy to use for those who like to keep their digits in the loop at every step.

In such a busy section of the app market, it's hard to stand out. We think The Hit List does just that. Its accompanying iPhone app is well designed, and the sync system, though a tad costly (around £12 per year) is quite brilliant.

Move over NetNewsWire – there's a new champ in town. Yes, that's how highly we regard Reeder, which has found its way to the Mac after cementing itself as a leading RSS reader for iPhone and iPad.

Read TechRadar's Reeder for iPad review

On entering your Google Reader details (required for the app – an account is free if you don't already have one), your feeds are displayed at the left of the three-pane interface.

The second pane houses the current feed's articles list and the rightmost pane displays the current article. If you don't like the default setup, you can fiddle to your heart's content, amending sync frequency, font size, clickable toolbar icons, and a ton of single-key shortcuts to important actions.

The shortcuts are important; they enable keyboard users to navigate Reeder with speed – useful when you consider how it places a firm emphasis on single-item focus, unlike NetNewsWire's tab-based approach.

Trackpad users are also catered for, if you want to have swipes and pinches perform actions.

If there's a negative side to Reeder, it's that the interface looks and feels a little alien. It still broadly follows Mac conventions, but more conservative Mac users might feel a little lost (and some holdovers from iOS-style design seem superfluous, such as the two-pane iPhone-like 'Minimized' mode).

But such quirks aside, there's really nothing to dislike here: Reeder is efficient, dependable and offers great clarity in its presentation of articles.

Compared to a lot of other free augmented reality apps, Layar is competently and attractively designed.

The way it augments data into the camera's view of the world is similar to Wikitude. You select a 'layer' to add to your camera and this will display the points of interest. The layers include accommodation, entertainment and lots more.

Some layers are paid-for, but most are free. In a similar vein to Wikitude, the layers are created by third parties and other uses, so this is a service that is heavily dependent on outside contributions.

On the whole, these layers seem better designed and more reliable than the 'worlds' of Wikitude. When browsing the 'layers' we found that most appeared to be only relevant to the US, where most of the Layar community is from. However when searching you can click the 'Nearby' tab to get results that apply to the area you're in.

Even in the relatively small city of Bath we found plenty of information, from local restaurants and pubs to events at the Bath Fringe Festival that was happening at the time. Points of interest are marked over the display.

Depending on the layer that you're using, the points can be accompanied by photographs, logos and links to extra information like websites and phone numbers. Some also include an option that uses Google Maps to give directions.

Layar isn't perfect, but the detail offered, coupled with a confident and well-designed interface, gives it a professional feel. Layar demonstrates how augmented reality can help us every day, and feels like the future of local information.

One of the best uses of augmented reality is for navigation. The Heads Up Navigator combines GPS positioning with augmented reality to help you find your way around.

When you start the app, you're prompted to add a location by clicking the '+' icon. You're then taken to a Google Maps view of your location. Typing in an address into the 'Location search' text box should in theory bring up the location you want to go to.

Unfortunately the results are hit and miss. We tried typing 'Sainsburys' to see if it would find one of the many stores in Bath. Instead it returned a 'location not found' error. Typing an address also proved fruitless, but entering the postcode gave the results we wanted.

As with a car GPS device, as long as you know the postcode, you'll find your way. It's functional, but not that user friendly. For locations closer to your current position, you can drag the marker to where you want to go, but this seemed to crash the app. Not a great start, but once you've managed to add the location and save it, you click 'Start live view' and things begin to improve.

Your saved locations hover over the landscape and point towards where you want to go. It's clear – and most importantly of all, it's accurate. The distance between you and your desired location is clearly labelled and it really does help you get your bearings.

The basic Navigator is free and includes adverts, while the paid-for app is £0.59. The adverts aren't very intrusive and there are bugs that still need to be ironed out, so we recommend using the free version for the time being.

Wikitude is free and not tied down to one particular platform, but its user collaboration element means it can occasionally seem rather slapdash.

There are no standard icons, and the information it offers is sometimes incomplete. However, beneath its slightly ugly exterior lies an augmented reality app with great depth. Most importantly, it works well.

When you first start the app you're presented with a number of 'worlds', each containing a selection of geotagged content. For example, clicking 'YouTube' will activate your device's camera, through which you'll see the world around you, with any YouTube videos that have been linked to your area displayed via icons on the screen.

Some of these videos will be about the place you're looking at, some will have been recorded or updated there, and some – unfortunately – have absolutely nothing to do with the location with which they are tagged.

This is a problem with any completely open collaborative project – there will always be a few users who mess around. Like fake celebrity dates of death on Wikipedia, lies can pop up from time to time in the various Wikitude worlds, but are more of a minor nuisance than a deal-breaker.

There are loads of 'worlds', though their usefulness depends on where you are and what you want. We doubt that many of our fine readers will need to know where the nearest Hooters bar is, but you never know.

By far the best world is Wikipedia, which links places of interest to online articles. Just point your device at a landmark to learn about it.

The Star Walk app for iPhone, iPod and iPad combines the age-old wonder of stargazing with the cutting-edge technology of augmented reality.

When you point your device at the sky, the app uses information about where you are (combined with the digital compass and camera if you're using an iPad 2) to display an image of the night sky. The stars above you are highlighted and named, along with constellations, planets and satellites.

Seeing the stars illuminated, and constellations traced and overlaid with astrological signs is a spellbinding experience, helped by the brilliant interface and presentation. Stars twinkle as celestial bodies slowly crawl across the screen, and the Sun even has a lens flare effect.

This app's accessibility is admirable considering its educational capabilities. Clicking on any named star, planet, constellation or satellite and then clicking the 'I' icon brings up its Wikipedia entry.

Although the app works perfectly during daylight hours, for the best results you should use it at dawn or dusk when the stars are just visible.

Although the iPad 2 offers the best experience for this app thanks to its large screen, and built-in digital compass and camera, you can still use the app with less feature-packed devices. You don't even need access to an internet connection, though some features are hampered and you need to enter your location manually.

This is an augmented reality app that goes further than telling you if there is a KFC around the next corner, and demonstrates the full potential of this technology.