When I decided to by an iPad, I had one killer application in mind: reading. I was hoping the device would also be useful otherwise, but cutting down on printing papers and the like was my main aim. As a researcher, I inevitably read a lot: research papers, books, reports, manuals, thesis drafts, the drafts of my own work-in-progress papers, and so on. I have got reading material on my desk at home, in my office, in my bag…it’s a mess. The prospect of consolidating it all into one device, which would hopefully also cover most of my note taking and sketching out of ideas, was enough to sell me on the iPad.
So, how did it work out? So far, very well — but slightly more than a week of use makes it hard to draw any final conclusions. The printed area of a paper is about the same as the size of the iPad screen, which combined with the high quality of the display makes for a good reading experience. Instead of printing a paper or other document I like to read, I now sync it to my iPad —usually using
Dropbox— and read it with
GoodReader for iPad. If I expect that I may want to refer to a paper at a later time, I’m adding it to my mobile library kept in
Papers. If I need to annotate a document —for example, for a review— I currently use
iAnnotate PDF. I like Dropbox, GoodReader, and Papers, but I’m only using iAnnotate as there doesn’t seem to be an alternative at the moment — the user interface is pretty rough.
In addition, I found over the last week that iPad is also the perfect Twitter device (I’m currently using
Twitterific for iPad), and great for reading blogs and online articles, which I often file away for later reading on my iPad using
Instapaper.
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