Big iPad App Release Day

It turns out that two major apps were upgraded or released today for the iPad: GoodReader had a major update (to version 3) and MacJournal for the iPad was released.

GoodReader is an inexpensive PDF reader for the iPad (and iPhone). It excels in many ways, but it's especially known for how well it handles large PDFs easily. It connects to several services for importing your PDFs including the must-have DropBox. It's a perfect PDF app in all ways except one: it did not have the ability to annotate PDFs. Instead you'd have to buy an application such as iAnnotate PDF to do annotations. (BTW, iAnnotate PDF is also a solid app.) Today version 3 of GoodReader was released and the major new feature: the ability to annotate PDFs!!!!!!!!

I've played around with version 3 a bit today, and it seems that way you add annotations is very easy and does not interrupt the flow of reading. The part that was unintuitive for me is how to change the icon for a note, or the color for a circle, line, or other figure. It turns out you simply draw in the default note, line, or object. Then when done, single-press on the new object and additional options come up for colors, type of icon and so forth. So actually doing everything I want with annotations is quite easy, but it wasn't obvious (to me) how to refine the look of a particular annotation at first.

MacJournal for the iPad is only a good option if you already use the wonderful Mac application MacJournal. MacJournal is a very solid software product that allows you to have multiple "journals" within one database. This is a very good program for integrating your various notes, letters, and other short writing into one place. In addition, MacJournal allows you to post new entries to a blog. The beauty of MacJournal for the iPad is now you can have all your MacJournal stuff on the Mac synced to your iPad. This can be incredibly useful if you have a large number of notes that you want to refer to via your iPad. You can easily create new entries using the iPad app also. So, if you're already a MacJournal user (or will be in the near future) then you'll definitely want to consider complementing the regular software with the iPad app. Definitely worth the $5.99 investment.