GoodReader is the iOS App that adds a file management system, open virtually any type of file and read and annotate PDF documents. David and Katie share how they use this app in their workflows and how it adds functionality to iOS devices.
Links of note
GoodReader for iPad
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There’s a second USB transfer method that doesn’t require iTunes (handy if you don’t want to go through the time of syncing).
http://www.iphone-explorer.com/AppPages/GoodReader.html
About text reflow:
It’s the (least painful) way I’m able to read PDFs on an iphone. I’m not sure about the embedded text or OCR comments because it has always worked for every PDF, without the need to prep it. It won’t display images in the text reflow mode, and therefore won’t work with PDFs that are purely images. And, like all PDF to text conversions, headers and footers and asides sometimes get placed in confusing situations, or small pieces of info just aren’t captured right. But these are minor annoyances compared to reading a PDF in 3pt font.
Ebook support is the biggest missing feature for me. PDF is the most important, but other formats becoming common. I have ebooks in all the formats (including the wacky ones), yet GR won’t handle them. Epub? Stanza. Mobi? Kindle. Chm? ReadCHM. CBR? Comic Zeal. Djvu? God help you.
I can’t wait until I have one reader to rule them all. By far GR is the closest.
Hey guys, about Instacast. I only have an iPod Touch, and WiFi is my only option, but it looks like you *can* stream or cache while on 3G; there is an option in the settings to enable it. I think the reason for it being disabled by default is that they assume you won’t want to waste bandwidth by having it download stuff without you telling it to. This way you can have auto-cache enabled, but not actually download anything unless you are on a WiFi network.
They also just added a killer feature, at least for my use case; the ability to send show notes to email or Instapaper. Awesome. Here’s what I would do before: Listen to podcast, want to look something up from show, go to show page, find links. Now I can simply see the show notes in Instacast, email them to myself, and when I am home catching up on stuff on my Mac, the links are right there to be acted on. (I do the same thing with links in Reeder, so it really is perfect for me.)
Enjoyed the show! Lots of stuff to explore and experiment with now…
I like Readdledocs better for the UI.
Hi there! For great PDF reading you should take a serious look at PDF expert. Much better UI than GoodReader and all the features you need, including annotation, highlight, Dropbox folder sync, send notes/highlight text via email etc. If file-management and podcasts are your thing, GoodReader still might be the better solution.
Another vote for Instacast, it’s an amazing app for those who don’t want (or can) use iTunes for podcast management.
Best MPU quote ever:
“Why spend $1.99 to download a show off of iTunes when you can spend 6 hours of your time coming up with a geeky solution.” -Katie
Every geek that listens to the show can identify with that (sarcastic) remark. It also sums up everything that I love about MPU.
Great, great, great stuff. Love it. [Still chuckling]
Katie,
re: goodreader and itivo. I think there might yet be a simpler way for you to get the video from your home computer to your ipad. I think you should look into Air Video. When you install that on a home computer, you can install the ipad/iphone version on your device and stream video to your device from your home computer if it is connected through wifi. It doesn’t work particularly well if you are behind a corporate wifi, but in those cases, zumocast works well. Air Video will convert while it is streaming, so if you have a decent enough connection, it works pretty well. I have been using it off and on for a year and I really like it and find it the most stable of the streaming options.
re: Instacast. You definitely can download on 3G, I do so on my 3GS from time to time. I love Instacast. For someone who likes podcasts as much as I do, it is a godsend.
Barbara,
I love the Air Video Application. The problem is, especially when traveling, that you don’t always have reliable internet access to stream the video. GoodReader allows you to actually download the video when the connection is available and then watch the video even when you’re offline.
The idea is, download the video at the hotel overnight while you’re connected to the WiFi, and then have the video for the plane/train/wherever the next day when you may not.
I only have the WiFi iPad, so I’m limited by connectivity. But, I agree, if you’ve got good connectivity, Air Video is a good solution.
Another vote for PDF Expert. It’s basically a pro version of Reedle Docs and it has pretty good feature parity with GoodReader. It’s also got an elegant interface and great PDF annotation tools.
I really like PDF Expert. It’s got all of the connectivity of Goodreader, and deals with PDF forms flawlessly. I emailed Readdle about adding TextExpander support to really make my workflow fly, and they hadn’t heard about it. If anyone else uses PDF Expert and TextExpander you should shoot them an email, they were pretty responsive.
Just finished listen to the podcast and wanted to make a comment regarding accessing podcast on road.
2 Thumbs up for Stitcher much easier than downloading them to my iphone due to memory. It has changed my podcasting life, hardly ever plug up my iphone to my computer I listen to all my podcast from stitcher instead of saving the podcast to my iphone via itunes. Even tells me when new podcast available on my favorites!
I use Goodreader with a Dropbox sync to keep track of my wife’s medical condition. I enter all of her medications and history into a Google Health account. Save the account as a PDF file and use a Hazel script to rename and move it from my downloads folder to the DropBox folder.
Now the Google Health information is available on my iPhone or iPad and I am not dependent on having a WIFI connection in the ER or doctors office to get to the internet. Had a ER visit 2 days ago and the staff was wowed when I pulled out the iPad and let them see the 20+ medications she is on and her 7 or 8 drug allergies.
I also keep a TXT file in Dropbox where I keep the notes from Doctors appointments, ER visits and hospitalizations. Good for me to keep straight what is going on and keep all of her doctor’s up to date on what the others are doing.
I got Instacast a few weeks ago and I have been loving it now it is my main way of listening to this and other podcast.
some of the features that instacast is getting and will get in future are available in Podcaster now. I just do not get praises over instacast
Katie and David,
I found a good explanation for number of features I have only glanced over. GoodReader was the first PDF reader on my iPad, but it is not now the one I use. In terms of features, and Dropbox integration, it is probably the top choice, but like David, GoodReader is very frustrating when it comes to actually work with PDF files.
Its two main drawbacks are:
1. Too slow. Yes, it handles large PDFs but moving around gets a bit sketchy.
2. Annotation takes a lot of steps, even the simple ones, and as soon as you start writing on the pages the PDF becomes super slow (you can actually see the redraw of your annotation).
I am currently using PDF Highlighter (no affiliation) which is the fastest and cleanest PDF reader for the iPad (and I have tried almost every one of them). It also has Dropbox integration, and navigation is easier because it has a preview loupe (a la Pages). David, you should take it for a spin.
Thank you guys for this show,
Jose
Hi David and Katie. I’m an orthopaedic surgeon in Brazil and really like your podcast!
Well, I use goodreader daily to read and highlight medical papers. I use papers (by Mekentosj) on the mac and iOS, but the lack of dropbox sync between them (you can download from iOS but it wont sync with dropbox) is a no go.
I agree with David about the difficulty and multiple touchs to highlight something. Sometimes I use a different solution: draw instead of highllight. If you set up the draw mode to 9pt and opacity to 25% it will look like the highlight option. You are able to touch only on the beginning and in the end of the each page…
The only problem is that you can’t email the highlighted text (sometimes I use the email summary option to help creating a mindmap or an omnioutliner summary).
Great show!
In regards to podcasting, I’ll have to add a +1 recommendation for Instacast, which is the best of the podcasts apps I tried. I tried an app called Casts ( which, I think, is called Pocket Casts now) which I also liked, but it didn’t have the ability to use authenticated podcast feeds, like the Mac Geek Gab premium feed.
if you are looking for a way to quickly put individual episodes onto your iOS device using one of these podcast apps, you can try huffduffer.com, which gives you a bookmarket (which works in Mobile Safari) that automatically creates a podcast of any audio files on a page.
Great show! I completely agree with David about highlighting: it should be something you can turn on, and then just use, page after page. This is something that iAnnotate has had, and it sold me on the app compared with GoodReader a year ago (though the page-turning in iAnnotate with highlighter on has gotten a bit buggy in version 1.4). But, of course, the interface has none of the versatility of GoodReader. (I’ve not tried PDF Expert yet.) Seems like a good candidate for a show — or part of a workflow show with an academic/legal researcher, in combination with an overview of reference managers (Zotero, Papers, Endnote, Mendeley, etc.).
But I have one other concern, particularly in connection with the episode about tagging. I’ve been using Tags.app from Gravity Apps to attach OpenMeta tags to my documents, in just the sort of hybrid between folder hierarchy and tags that was described in that show. Here’s the problem: moving files into and out of GoodReader or iAnnotate on the iPad strips them of OpenMeta tags. It took me a while to notice this, which is even more crazy-making. I’ve raised this twice with the folks at iAnnotate, but their response, while friendly, was that they had never heard of OpenMeta tagging and that no one had complained about this. And, indeed, I can’t find anyone talking about this anywhere on the web. But I’m using up-to-date MacBook and iPad software on everything, and it still seems to be a problem.
I’d love to hear anyone’s ideas on how to fix this. Or even just a workable kludge. In the meantime, I’m just manually retagging everything with a “- Annotated” filename.
Fabulous show; you do a great job of providing plenty hold the attention of the über-nerds, while still keeping just plain serious users engaged!
Joel
“an overview of reference managers (Zotero, Papers, Endnote, Mendeley, etc.)”
I agree, but would amend the parenthetical bit to “(Sente, etc.)”. It’s the best Mac/iPad combination, allowing annotation and tagging on the Mac or the iPad.
Just got this in reply to a query to PDF Expert:
“OpenMeta tags will be removed when you move your documents to PDF Expert.” So the radio silence on the web about this seems to be not a matter of my having imagined the problem!
My favorite PDF app for the last 6 months or so has been Noterize. Annotations are easy to do, and one nice feature is the ability to choose specific pages (e.g. the ones that you’ve annotated) to email out to a collaborator.
I asked the PDF Pen people about PDF file encryption versus having the file in an encrypted disk image.
They said “That’s a very good question. It seems the answer is, not quite. In an encrypted PDF only the strings and streams are encrypted, so it may be possible to collect some random bits of information like color scheme, page count, etc. An encrypted disk image encrypts all the data it contains, so effectively the entire PDF gets encrypted. It is unlikely that someone would glean much useful data from an encrypted PDF, but there is a slight difference between an encrypted PDF and an encrypted disk image.”
I take it from that any information that could be extracted from an encrypted PDF file is garbage?!