Ideas from Mark Stout

It seems everyone and their brother are writing posts listing the apps they have on their iPad.  I read everyone one I come across and have found several new programs I didn't know about. In honor of my sister receiving an iPad for her birthday today, I thought I'd do my own list. Unless otherwise noted, all apps mentioned are free. E-Mail and Calendar Oddly, the built-in Calendar and E-mail apps don't do much for me.  Since I share the iPad with my wife, I tend to use the web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar.  I do have my e-mail credentials in the e-mail app so I can e-mail out pages from applications. Books The #1 need here is to add Amazon's Kindle app.  Amazon currently has more books available for Kindle then Apple does in the iBook store.  More importantly, the Kindle is cross platform .  You can only read iBooks on the iPad and iPhone.  You can read Kindle on those and Android phones and many other platforms, including of ...

Since the iPad is not meant to do all the things we do with computers, I find myself now, when I encounter a task I cannot do on my iPad, wondering how I can make the iPad do it. A good example :   once a week I receive an e-mail with a document attached.  I'd like that document to be in the GoodReader application on my iPad so it is available always, even if I am somewhere I do not have internet connectivity. GoodReader brings in documents from Dropbox , so I wondered if Dropbox supported a way of e-mailing in a document.  After all, Evernote allows you to e-mail it content so it is a reasonable feature to expect. Alas, Dropbox does not have that feature. In my course of my research, I came across a little PC application, MailDrop from Michael Warren. MailDrop watches your Gmail account and watches any e-mails belonging to a Gmail Label "Dropbox".  MailDrop then saves any attachments to your Dropbox account. MailDrop is an app that runs on your PC. ...

Friday I wrote about the advantages of using Dropbox with the iPad to make it easy to move over PDF files. The PDF files do not look as clear as they should that way. Saturday night I was playing around in the App Store and was looking at PDF Readers.  I have bought very few programs for the iPad but knew I needed a good PDF reader. I found GoodReader ( iTunes link ) at a promotion price of 99 cents. GoodReader takes a little playing with.  The user interface is not as intuitive as we have come to expect on the iPad but if you read the help by touching the question mark, you'll get going fairly quick. What makes GoodReader positively sexy is it is able to import files directly from more than one Dropbox account.  I added my Dropbox account and my wife's account. Dropbox is but one way to move files over.  You can also wi-fi them over, or move via iTunes.  Dropbox though seems to be the easiest to me. Reading PDF files is one of those fundamenta...