Archive for the ‘pdf on the ipad’ tag
PDF Reader Pro iOS app now converts to PDF, supports annotations no comments
The PDF Reader Pro app for iPhone and iPad just got an update. 
Version 2.6.2 adds the ability to convert various file formats to PDF on your iPhone or iPad. This seems to be a very rare feature when it comes to the iOS PDF viewing apps. You can purchase a dedicated file converter like Convert to PDF Pro ($5.99 at iTunes), but you will then need another app to view and annotate your converted PDF files.
The new version of PDF Reader Pro also adds a standard set of annotating abilities — highlighting, underline and strikethrough.
Other features include:
- Typed notes in a box and sticky notes.
- Freehand drawing.
- Scan from camera.
- Access files via Dropbox, Mobile ME, Google Docs and iDisk.
- WebDAV support.
- Compatible with MS Office files, images, audio and video files, HTML and Safari files.
There are a number of iOS apps for reading PDF documents. Some, like iAnnotate (see my iAnnotate review, but there have been many updates and new features added since my review) have very robust annotating capabilities. But if you need the ability to not only view and make a few notes on your PDFs, but also to be able to convert other file formats to PDF on your iDevice, PDF Reader Pro might be worth looking at. $5.99 at iTunes.
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GoodReader iOS app gets auto sync no comments
GoodReader announced today that its PDF and document viewing app for the iPad and iPhone now has an auto sync feature. From the press release:
GoodReader, named as the 2010’s #2 best-selling iPad app in the U.S., is now available with an amazingly simple-to-use Auto Sync
feature which enables users to download documents or entire folders from remote servers and mark them to automatically synchronize. Changes made to documents in GoodReader will instantly be available for others to access on the remote server with a simple tap of the Sync button. Other key new features are the ability to download entire folders from remote servers, rather than only individual files, and support for SugarSync.
“This entire update to GoodReader is dedicated to the ‘Live on the cloud’ idea,” said Yuri Selukoff, president of Good.iWare. “GoodReader’s Auto Sync is a beautiful feature — with the touch of one button, several documents or folders from several different servers can be synced simultaneously and available to everyone with access to the folder.”
The Auto Sync feature is a solution requested by companies that must push out identical documents to remote employees, such as airlines who must send thousands of pages of updates to all pilots or sales departments issuing product pricing catalogs to their sales teams. Now, GoodReader enables users to add/delete new files and folders to a synced folder, and with a simple tap on the "Sync" button all contents on the remote server will match that of GoodReader. Likewise, if a file is modified – such as annotating a PDF file – it will get uploaded to the remote server (or vice versa) during sync. This feature aims to improve collaboration among colleagues or with customers, enabling numerous people to simultaneously work on the same document.
The Auto Sync feature works with MobileMe iDisk, Dropbox, SugarSync, box.net, and any other WebDAV or FTP server.
GoodReader is available at iTunes for $2.99.
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eReader & Tablet News – 9/30/2010 no comments
Infinity Publishing announced today that it has struck a deal with Sony to sell its books through Sony’s Reader Store. Infinity specializes in self-published authors and on demand publishing.
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Amazon is giving away five free Wi-Fi Kindle 3 ereaders. To enter, you just need to visit Amazon’s Kindle page on Facebook and become a fan by clicking on the “Like” button. US residents 18 years of age or older are eligible. The contest runs from September 27 through October 18, 2010.
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This Saturday, October 2, will be the 60th anniversary of Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. As part of the celebrations a social media game will be hosted. One of the prizes is an iPad:
Also this month, PEANUTS fans are celebrating the 60th anniversary of their favorite comic strip via the "Countdown to the Great Pumpkin" (www.greatpumpkincountdown.com) game. This online social media game invites Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Foursquare and YouTube users to join the Anniversary fun by completing a series of daily PEANUTS-themed "to-dos" from early September through Halloween. Players earn points for each task completed—such as sharing a PEANUTS quote with their friends or followers, or changing their profile picture to that of a PEANUTS character—and the winner will take home a special PEANUTS-loaded iPad and have a shot at an extra $25,000. Weekly winners receive prizes throughout the contest and members of the Schulz family—including Charles Schulz’s son Craig, daughter Jill, and widow, Jeannie—are playing along, offering their own PEANUTS memories and suggesting some of the daily to-dos.
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Will we be seeing ereaders and other devices with word definitions powered by Dictionary.com?
Today Dictionary.com (www.dictionary.com), the leading online and mobile dictionary, announced the launch of its API Developer Center (developer.dictionary.com), a user-friendly distribution channel for its easy to integrate open API. The Center demonstrates Dictionary.com’s commitment to shaping the evolution of online, mobile and connected devices by providing ‘information in the moment,’ enabling developers to integrate its content and features into not only digital learning and entertainment platforms, but an endless range of applications across all platforms. Additionally, the Center will offer developers opportunities for heightened visibility via a visual gallery highlighting creative uses of the API.
"People want access to word definitions in context, without navigating away from what they are doing – Dictionary.com’s vision with the API Developer Center is to make this the standard online and mobile experience," said Shravan Goli, President, Dictionary.com. "Now literally every developer of any application that utilizes words can integrate Dictionary.com’s content and features so that their users can effortlessly experience word discovery."
Use of the API will be free for non-commercial use, and Dictionary.com will offer its content and features for commercial use on a revenue-share and fee-based basis.
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Tokyo-based Seirindo Co., Ltd. will be making its manga magazines available as an iPad app. The Garo manga is available now, with Cycle Boys and Tale of Charcoal Burner coming in October. The description of these in the iTunes store is in Japanese, though the info on the app says it is English language – I didn’t buy one ($2.99) so I’m not sure.
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The GoodReader PDF handling app got a major upgrade today. Some of the new features:
- all annotations that you create or edit in GoodReader – notes, highlights, markups, and drawings – are saved in a PDF file, so you will be able to see them later on a computer or in another copy of GoodReader on your colleague’s device
- all notes, highlights, markups, and drawings created outside GoodReader, and properly stored in a PDF file, can be viewed or edited in GoodReader
- types of annotations that you can create and edit in GoodReader: comments ("sticky notes") with 7 different icons, text highlights, freehand drawings, lines, arrows, rectangles, ovals, text underlines, text deletion marks (strikeouts), text insertion marks, text replacement marks. You can freely adjust color of all of the above.
- other types of annotations that you can view in GoodReader: text boxes with callouts, polygons and polylines, squiggly underlines, cloudy shapes, rubber stamps, file attachments. All annotations that can be viewed, can also be deleted. In addition, some of them can be edited in a limited fashion (color, placement, scale).
- you can now extract files from PDF file attachments
GoodReader is $0.99 at iTunes.
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Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth is predicting that Amazon will sell 5 million Kindles this year and 11.5 million in 2012. Some of the factors contributing to high unit sales include lower pricing and availability at multiple outlets. Anmuth also thinks that Kindles are not in direct competition with tablets anymore, “A bifurcated market has clearly developed between more expensive, multi-function tablets and cheaper, dedicated eReaders.”
You can read more at ZDNet.
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Mary Lou Jepsen writes in the Pixel Qi blog that a 10-inch Pixel Qi screen that connects and is powered by a USB cable is being developed by Display Solutions AG. You could use this as a secondary screen that can be read in sunlight. It would also be possible to power the display with batteries and use a wireless USB connection. Below is a short video of the screen in sunlight.
These should be in production by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011.
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Onkyo has launched three new Windows 7 – based tablets. Two will have 10.1-inch multitouch screens while the third will have a 11.6-inch display. All come with a 32GB SSD, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Battery life doesn’t look that good (at least when compared to the iPad’s 10 hours) — ranging from 3.8 hours to 6 hours depending on the model.
Prices range from ¥49,800 ($597 USD) to ¥69,800 ($836). Onkyo expects to begin shipping in mid-October.
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iPad and Tablet News – 7/5/2010 no comments
The Wall Street Journal reports that South Korea’s largest wireless provider, SK Telecom, is in talks with Apple to offer the iPhone and iPad in that country. The iPhone is already available in South Korea through KT Corp, which is SK Telecom’s biggest competitor.
Korea is one of the countries that briefly banned the iPad when it was first introduced in the US. The ban lasted until the appropriate government agency certified the iPad’s wireless networking features.
Korean is also one language that is MIA on the iPad.
While I am on the topic of the iPad’s language support, this is one type of accessibility that the iPad is good at delivering and that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. The fact that the iPad is great for providing email and Internet access to the elderly and others who would not otherwise have access due to computer illiteracy is old news, but the support for various languages takes this to another level.
The iPad currently only supports nine languages, but it is very easy to set these up in the Settings. If you install the keyboards for any of the other supported languages you can then switch back and forth between keyboards very easily with a tap on the global key while the virtual keyboard is displayed. My wife reads in Japanese, so I have that keyboard installed for her as well as the English keyboard that I use. My wife now uses the iPad for all of her Web browsing as it is much easier than setting up and using Japanese on the desktop.
If you know an elderly person from the old country that cannot currently use email or access the Internet, the iPad may not only provide that access but allow him/her to do it in their preferred language – which can make a huge difference. Hopefully Apple will increase the number of languages supported.
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LG has announced that it will enter the tablet market by the fourth quarter of 2010 with an Android-based device. No details yet, but engadget has a video of the LG UX10 tablet prototype at Computex 2010.
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Of the many apps available at the iTunes Store for reading 
PDF files, GoodReader is probably the most popular. Good.iWare, the developer behind GoodReader, has announced the reintroduction of USB support for its app.
File transfer via USB was available until a few months ago when app developers had to discontinue USB support due to a conflict with Apple’s iPhone SDK.
You will need to download and install the GoodReaderUSB program on your desktop, but there are advantages over transferring files using iTunes:
| GoodReader USB | iTunes |
| Transfer files and folders. | Transfer only files; no folders. |
| Browse deeply into subfolders from your computer. | Transfers only to the root folder; cannot browse subfolders. |
| Works with all versions of GoodReader and all eligible devices. | Requires GoodReader v.2.8 (not yet released) for compatibility with iTunes File Sharing. |
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Future Apps is the developer of the iSpeak Translators, which
are the best selling translation apps in the iTunes store. The developer recently announced a major update to the iSpeak Translators as well as some new language support.
With the addition of iSpeak Arabic, iSpeak Greek and iSpeak Russian, the number of languages supported has increased to 14: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, jCzech, Finnish, and Norwegian. The iSpeak apps cost $1.99 each.
This is another app that will make good use of the multitasking features of iOS4 – enabling you to switch in and out of the app without getting dropped out of other apps, such as an ebook you are reading. The iSpeak apps also include TTS that you could have playing a translation in the background while doing something else. iOS4 should be coming to the iPad in November of this year.
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PDF on the iPad – iAnnotate Review – Annotations! no comments
Probably the most well known app for reading PDF documents on the iPad is 
GoodReader which does work quite well. The problem with GoodReader is that if you need to make notes or annotations you are pretty much SOL.
Enter iAnnotate. This app is from Aji and lets you bookmark and make text notes as well as supporting markup annotations such as highlighting, underlining and strikeouts. Freeform drawing is also supported – and you can choose multiple colors for all of these functions to use.
This is probably one app that could benefit from the use of a stylus that will work with the iPad rather than resorting to finger painting when precision drawing is called for.
iAnnotate uses toolbars for the various annotation and navigation functions. You can customize each toolbar by adding and removing individual tools and moving the toolbars to different positions on the screen. The size and opacity of the toolbars can also be adjusted.
Documents that you have loaded into iAnnotate are displayed as tabs at the top of the screen which allows you to switch between them quickly. Page locations are remembered when you switch between documents. You also can perform searches in your document and search through your annotations. All of the standard iPad gestures are supported so that pan and zoom, etc. work well.
Search functions allow you to search through your entire PDF library.
Getting Your Documents Into iAnnotate
You will need to download and install the Aji PDF Service for either your Mac or PC so that your iPad can connect to and retrieve PDF documents from your desktop. The Aji PDF Service not only is used to transfer documents but also processes and extracts the metadata of your PDF docs, so while you can transfer files from other iPad apps such as Goodreader you probably won’t be able to use the annotating tools if you do so. The documentation indicates that it may be possible to bypass the Aji Service in the future, but at any rate it is a free download and worked fine for me.
Sharing Your Annotated Documents
Your annotated documents can be shared using standard PDF annotations and can be viewed in a standard PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader. There are plans to allow email of annotated documents and text-only annotation summaries in future updates. At the moment you can upload your annotated documents to your computer via Aji Reader Service.
The iAnnotate app gives you lots of tools to work with in lots of colors. Currently you can purchase the iAnnotate app for $6.99 from iTunes, but Aji says that the price will go up to $9.99 when version 1.1 update is released, which will probably be in the next week or two (it has already been submitted to Apple for review). Version 1.1 will include iTunes/USB transfer, Web downloads, ability to attach annotated PDFs to emails, brightness control slider and other fixes.
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PDF on the iPad Using GoodReader no comments
GoodReader is one of the most popular apps for reading PDF files on the iPad, and at only $.99 is a good value (presuming, of course, that you have already spent $500+ for an iPad).
GoodReader not only handles PDF files but also MS Office, iWork documents, images, video and audio. The current version also supports Apple’s Document Sharing.
The iPad’s color screen is great for viewing graphic-rich documents, and its speed and responsive touchscreen make it quite adept at doing things like panning and zooming. The downside is that you cannot scribble or make annotations on your documents with GoodReader. This fits pretty well with my overall impression of the iPad so far – great for viewing content, but less well suited for authoring and editing. You can get the GoodReader app from iTunes.
Below is a video I made with the GoodReader iPad app.
Transferring PDF Files From Your Computer to Your iPad
Before you can read your PDF files using GoodReader, you will need to get them onto your iPad. GoodReader lets you search on your iPad for files, browse the Net for files to download, or connect to a local Wi-Fi network.
You can of course also connect your iPad to your computer using the dock connector to USB cable and download files. This is quite easy using iTunes. The following shows how to transfer files using the USB connection.
First connect your iPad to your computer using the dock connector to USB cable and start iTunes.
- Click on your iPad in iTunes.
- Click on the Apps tab at the top.
- Scroll down and you will find the File Sharing section. Click on the GoodReader app.
- You can either drag and drop your PDF files into the GoodReader Documents section or click on the Add button at the bottom to browse for the desired files. If you elect to browse for your files just click on Open when you have selected the files you want to add to your iPad.
- When you have finished adding the PDF files that you want to transfer click on the Sync button in the bottom right corner of the iTunes window – don’t forget to do this!
