ipad update procrastination
i posted a while ago wondering what pdf annotator to go with for ze ipad (best accidental score ever), so i thought i'd procrastinate from writing my masters and ramble on about it.
first, i can't even really imagine life B.I. (before ipad). well, i can. but my point is that it has become a phenomenal tool for doing school readings, especially as i move towards hoarding as many ebooks as i can. Because, um, we all know book books are spendy - like Ingold's perception of the environment, which i've been looking for lately?? 50+ bucks. ugh. And our school's library system is THE SUCK. i'm not even going to get started on it. anyway, as a bonus, it doesn't matter if i forget to print out and bring articles, because i can just download them anywhere, especially if they're already in my dropbox (and if i have wifi). I can carry a book and twenty articles or just one article or whatever. i don't need to take my laptop to school anymore, which is considerably lighter when biking back and forth. and on and on.
so for a long time i was trying to work w/ neu.annotate, and it was ok for small-scale reading, like if i was moving pdf's in and out of the ipad quickly without building up a big library in the program itself. BUT as far as i could tell, there was no way to organize files into folders. so when neu.annotate started crapping out on me in connectivity to dropbox, i ditched it. in retrospect, it felt kind of limited.
now i'm on notability, which i like fairly well so far. i can organize my files into categories and subjects, it can auto-sync w/ dropbox, the text input works alright (although i'm still getting used to it in terms of resizing and making sure i use a text box always) and it just feels like it writes more smoothly. we'll see. i thought about dropping some change for iannotate or goodreader or something, but so far, notability is working out ok. it's really easy to use as just a note-taker as well - i type my text notes in, but can also draw in diagrams and such, so, yay, cool. plus, $0.99 right now. yay cheeep.
i need to investigate this more (and maybe it has happened already), but i'd love for there to be an easier way to sync up pdf annotation on the ipad and citations management (Mendeley) on my computer, especially in transferring annotated pdfs back to my laptop and back into Mendeley. It would be especially great to be able to cut out the middle man (computer downloads to dropbox to notability to dropbox to computer(to)mendeley). Any thoughts?
