I wrote another post for LifeHack.org:
Back in the day, we all reviewed and edited documents with a red pen, highlighter, and sticky notes. Then came track changes and comments in MS Word or maybe you used the Review tools in Adobe Acrobat to annotate comments and edits on a PDF while sitting at your PC or Mac. Now we can use an iPad and iAnnotate PDF, a powerful alternative to GoodReader. The document reviewing process has gone from paper to PC and now to iPad without missing a beat.
I upgraded to one of the new iPads, which reignited my interest in alternative writing tools. It has been an off and on interest of mine for a while and just because client requirements dictate the tools at my day job doesn’t mean I can’t keep my fingers in other apps. Therefore, I recently decided to check out Byword, a text editor for Mac OSX and iOS, and put it through its paces.
If anything, I think knowing alternative tools has helped with my ability to troubleshoot problems in the tools I use on client projects.
If you work with documents, you are probably awash in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files, so one of the first apps to install on your iPad is a good PDF Reader. The list of Adobe Reader apps for the iPad is ever growing.
Even better news is that Retina Display support is dropping on some of the readers I profile in this post making the iPad even more attractive for reading PDFs. App developers are also using the latest iPad’s launch to crush bugs and tighten up user interfaces which only adds to the good news.
While you can read PDFs through iBooks, there are many great (even business class) options available for viewing and even annotating PDFs on your iPad including:
My post Six reasons why the tablet will replace the desk phone just went live on the Tablets in the Enterprise Blog on TechRepublic.com. I just started writing for them so look forward to future posts from me about tablet use in the corporate enterprise.
My guest post entitled How to Put a Wiki on your iPad appears today on Lifehack.org.
I read Publishing with iBooks Author because I am scoping out the iBooks format for some potential personal projects. As a technical writer, I know that eBooks are part of my professional future as well. The book serves as a great introduction to iBooks Author even for those without extensive electronic publishing experience.
The book starts with a tour of the application that provides feature and interface details on this very well designed authoring application. Chapter 2 delves into Book Building Basics that while second nature to many publishing professionals including print jockeys takes on some added wrinkles especially when it comes to widgets and interactivity. I was happy with the book’s approach in Chapter 3. While iBooks Author includes a powerful text editor (along the lines of the excellent Apple Pages or so it reminds me of), if you are like me you are going to import content from a document to publish – so I found the directions on importing a text file to be especially useful (and my favorite part of the book).
Take Control of Screen Sharing in Lion by Glenn Fleishman from TidBITS Publishing, Inc is a comprehensive book about the technology and art of Screen Sharing in OSX Lion. It’s the book to read if you want to learn the ropes of screen sharing in OSX Lion.
Fleishman leads readers through the basics of screen sharing through screen sharing with iChat (good coverage just too bad iChat is going away); sharing via BonJour; sharing via direct network connection; sharing via Back to My Mac; and sharing via Skype. The steps are all very detailed in each section. However, I would have liked the book to be a bit more generous with screen captures for the more novice Mac users reading this book.
One of the technologies I’ve been waiting to advance more into the mainstream is electronic signatures. While I have a smooth process down to print out contracts and other documents that need my signature and then scan them into PDFs with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, I would still like to whittle down the signatory process even further. Now that EchoSign, an electronic signature solution is an Adobe acquisition, I decided to reopen my research into electronic signature options.
When I first thought about enterprise uses for the iPad, project management was at the top of my list. When I first held the device in my hands, I could imagine it replacing many paper based tasks and offering an unprecedented level of mobility for tasks like project management. ProjectPlanner HD for iPad helps fulfill that early of vision of mine for the iPad as a project management tool. While it can be easy to argue that iPad project management apps lack the robustness of mainstream project management applications like Microsoft Project and cloud-based apps like Liquid Planner and Zoho Projects, they do offer the features that the non-PMP ninja PMs should find useful.
I’ve been using Penultimate since I first got my iPad. Up until now, I had to email my Penultimate note pads to my Evernote account. The email step in my workflow was fine but I longed for Penultimate to get Evernote integration.
Well, my wish came true because of its last release, Penultimate now includes Evernote integration enabling you to send Penultimate notebooks and pages directly from the app into your Evernote account without workarounds like having to email Penultimate notebooks to your Evernote email address.
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