Tag: ipad

What is a good Pen PDF application?

thinkpad-stylusI haven’t found a good pen PDF application for android or Windows.  I don’t have an iPad so I don’t know about pen pdf apps on it.  What I mean by a pen PDF is being able to use a stylus to write directly on a PDF and have it save.  First, the adobe reader app for android does do this.  However, the stylus I use has a fat rubber head and I am not sure I will get the lines thin enough with a more pen-like stylus.  I need more accuracy to fill out entries on a pdf.

PDF apps on my Thinkpad 2 tablet are not very good either.  I have tried 3 of them thus far and they have all sucked.  Adobe reader doesn’t support stylus, foxit shows that it can do it but I couldn’t get my stylus or finger to draw anything and the other program I downloaded I can’t even remember it’s name now.

Lastly, Windows built in PDF Reader happens to work the best if I can even use that word.  First, there is no undo, Second, it is lagging and lastly, writing on the table while it is in vertical mode is a waste of time.  It is virtually useless.   You might think that all I would need to do is to turn it back to landscape then, well, at least this tablet has a very difficult time rotating.  For some reason it just won’t rotate if I am looking at a PDF.  Sometimes it doesn’t rotate even if I am in the desktop!

I work about once a week doing independent contractor work at different sites.  As you can expect I have lots of paperwork to fill out.  Instead of wasting the ink and paper to print and bring with I much prefer to have it all in my tablet.  Even if it was printed on paper I would be scanning and emailing the document once I was through with it.  From what I can tell there may be some excellent apps on the iPad that would do what I am looking for.  Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of an iPad for just one purpose. Believe me when I say just 1 purpose because I can’t stand how the iPad is locked down.

I am going to keep on searching but I hope I can figure out a solution to this.

iPad May Be Simple to Use but it is Not simple to use with iTunes

ipadThe iPad my be simple to Use but it is not simple to use iTunes.  What I mean by this is I needed to add movies to my wife’ s iPad for her travels.  If it was an android tablet I would connect it to the computer with USB and drag and drop the movies onto the tablet.  Can I do this with an iPad.  NOOOOOOOOO.  This was the 2nd time I put movies on.  The first time was a pain and the second time was also a pain.  Lets add on to the complexity.  First, the ipad was originally synced with her work computer that bit the dust.  Second, the iPad was looking for the old computer to sync wirelessly but it was setup to backup to the iCloud(a disgrace to cloud services).  Third, the tablet would pop-up with a trust notification in iOS7 but would not show up in iTunes.  The Windows Device Manager said it was an “Apple iPad” but now I know that is a misnomer.  I needed it to show up as a USB device.  I updated the drivers by pointing it to the Apple files in the common folder.  That fixed that up.  Now since the iPad was originally setup with another computer I can’t just copy the movies over.   I have to erase and then restore the iPad.  Songs did not all match up with what was on the iPad or in iTunes so I hope everything is still there.  I think I spent 1.5 hours trying to put movies on it.

Ipad looks cool but Apple is Missing some items

I like what I see with this Ipad but I don’t like two things right away.

1. It uses a micro SIM card – which from twitter no one seems to know anything about. The primary concern here is I can’t just pop in my existing SIM card from my AT&T phone.
2. No external Micro SD card slot. This should be mandatory and would help with transferring files between computers in a pinch. Of course all the memory is built in and that means more money in Apple’s pockets.

It is still interesting and priced better than I expected.