Life with an iPad: pdfs
July 26, 2011
I think I’m back to Tech Blogging… With my new gig coming up as the first Educational Technologist at MJBHA, combined with my vast audience of a dozen Twitter and Google+ followers (pretty much the same crowd), someone might actually read one of these. ‘אם ירצה ה.
One of the main reasons I bought an iPad 2 was to load pdf documents on to it – I was printing out way too many articles on paper, and as I was packing up the house to declutter it, I had to decide when and whether I was ever going to get to that huge stack of printouts. (The answer – No, never.)
So I have stuck a toe into the waters of pdf readers for iPad. (I was not yet interested in those apps that allow you to annotate pdfs. Maybe later. All I wanted was a non-cumbersome reader.)
Observation #1 – Adobe doesn’t make a reader for the iPad? What the heck?!
Observation #2 – Paying for an app does not always equal getting a superior product. I have wasted too much on $1.99 apps that were useless, or no better than the free stuff out there. So I am ISO quality freebies, because the iPad itself was not chump change. It’s like buying a car and not being able to afford gas.
My recommendation so far is a combo of two products:
FileApp – is great for getting the files off your computer and on to you iPad without using iTunes. I find going through iTunes to be a royal pain. FileApp allows various methods of file transfer, including via usb and most importantly, WiFi. You link your computer to the app and drag files into a folder, and just like on Star Trek, they rematerialize on your iPad. However, I have found its file-reading abilities to be sub-par. It is very slow to respond to touch and to changing orientation. Frustrating. But once the file is transferred onto the iPad, FileApp is kind enough to offer to open it in any of your pdf readers.
iBooks – Who’d a thunk it? The built-in app for iPad is actually pretty good. Not perfect. But it gets out of the way and lets me read.
