Tablet and Mobile

Posts Tagged ‘GoodReader’

Well, not a lot really…  not the iPad as such – we’re all assuming we’ll get the operating system upgrade in the near future – but in APPS… one of my favourite Apps SPLASHTOP REMOTE has stopped working because they’ve messed up the PC end… other apps continue to run but nothing exciting, there hasn’t been a show-stopper new game for months unless you like RAGE HD which ok, is quite fun for a while. Incidentally Splashtop when it’s working is great as it allows you to view and control your PC remotely and it’s FAR better than Logmein, even allowing full speed video (Flash) playback in a local network.

I’ve also been playing with ISMESTORAGE – if you need to access information remotely this is one handy application. Microsoft now give away 25 gigabytes for free as part of their SKY DRIVE and ISMESTORAGE is one of the few iPad Apps that can make use of it – I’m hoping GOODREADER will get their act together and hook into this shortly.

Other than that very little to report, I still think the iPad(2) is the best tablet on the planet and they seem to have successfully headed off the only competitor (Samsung) – indeed, industry reports suggest that they’re not going to play with Samsung at all in the future (Samsung currently supply the A4 and A5 processors). Could really do with some new, original APPS around now…

The iPhone and iPad just keep getting better – and it’s not really anything that Apple have done – it’s more a case of the Apps. Where Apple got it right was in their designs and marketing – everyone who has an iPad or iPhone says “it just works” – and with that basis the App designers have been able to get on with the job. Some of the Apps are so far ahead of anything on the Android or Microsoft markets – it’s hard to see them catching up anytime soon.

An example might be Goodreader.  I bought this for 99 pence right at the beginning when I got my iPhone, great PDF reader but it’s uses were limited on the phone – then out came the iPad and almost immediately they had an iPad-specific version of the software.  One of it’s few limitations was the ability to ANNOTATE PDFs- and many folk said to me – but I need to scribble on my PDFs at meetings..  I conveyed this back to the developers – no doubt many other people did – and only a couple of days ago, upgrades for the iPad came out – with iPhone upgrade coming this morning.

This program ALONE is worth getting an iPad for! It’s still 99p and reads PDFs, reads their bookmarks, works with links, lets you annotate and scribble on PDFs… and it’s not just limited to PDFs, the package can read a wide variety of formats and from a wide variety of sources.

The Android market has a product most likely deliberately named “A Good Reader” – it’s not even in the same class and some of the others out there can’t even handle bookmarks.

The bottom line is – if you need to read documents on the go – you can’t beat an iPad and GoodReader – if you can’t manage that then the next best thing is an iPhone with GoodReader!

HDR Photography and more

Then there is HDR photography, the greatest thing to happen to the amateur photographer since the digital camera. While PC conversion software struggles to work with multiple images (I’ve not seen one package that does the job properly yet) – PRO HDR on the iPhone produces brilliant results.

Take a look at the photo on the left, shot into the sun this morning – the sun is so powerful that hardly any other detail gets through – the sky is completely bleached and you can only just make out the vegetation.

The same photo taken with Pro HDR on the same iPhone… is very different – more detail and the sky is just about perfect. All that for 99 pence or thereabouts – and the patience to left the camera take 2 pictures in a row and automatically merge them for you. 

Consider your average daytime indoor shot – you can have a choice – detail in the room or detail outside of the window – not any more – this package on the iPhone lets you have the best of both worlds.

The last shot here was taken a couple of weeks ago in Bellingham in Northumberland (UK for any overseas visitors) and shows the high street – similar conditions – a normal photo would have netted a perfectly white sky… as it happens this photo – again taken on the iPhone and with Pro HDR – perfect.

More shots of this nature at the HollyBerry Cottage website – most of the shots there were made of multiple HDR photos then run through panorama software.

And there’s more – after having no decent note-taking software, the iPad now has NOTES PLUS – a brilliant innovation that lets you enter handwriting at reasonable size – but using your finger – it has to be seen to be believed.

Meanwhile tests with the Android tablet are not going too well up to now – I’ve a bunch of questions and the dealer has not come back to me today. I can see a return coming on – the screen is unresponsive – no sign of the hallowed Android 2.2 upgrade… and it won’t even play all my movies (oh, VLC is now on the iPad so that’s the limitation on M4V files gone).

And so it continues…

 

Peter Scargill

 

 

As more and more people get iPads, many of use are using these for business.. one of the major failings of laptops is that hiding behind them is often seen as somewhat unsociable – and they need power, constantly with most laptops failing to get more than 2-4 hours out of the batteries…  along comes the iPad with enough power for a full-day meeting – but what it lacks by default is decent document reading software.

Of course as the APPS are generally dirt cheap it’s easy to go online and grab a handful of document readers…. but which one is the best?

I’ve been using the iPad since long before they were introduced into the UK and without doubt the must-have document reader for me is GoodReader. It costs next to nothing and handles PDFs, WORD and other documents but so do other readers like iAnnotate – so why should you get GoodReader?

Well, for starters, any properly prepared PDF document that’s more than a few pages long will have bookmarking all set up allowing you to get to any part of the document at the touch of a button. PDF readers for PCs have long been able to handle such bookmarks but sadly, most of the iPad readers do NOT. GoodReader is the exception and that’s just one of it’s features – it can import documents from a wide variety of sources including but not limited to DropBox, FTP, your PC, web pages and more.  NO it doesn’t do tabbed document reading like iAnnotate, which allows you to instantly flick from one document to another – but no-one says you can’t have BOTH – and I frequently flick back and forth between these two excellent programs. I’m expecting that before long the people who make GoodReader will add these extra features and of course updates are free.

WELL worth getting if you’re using your iPad for anything other than game-playing, GoodReader is a cheap, solid program that will help turn your iPad into a solid business tool.

 

Peter Scargill