iPad: iAnnotate PDF app reviewed

One of the main things I have been using my iPad for is eye candy in meetings, let's face it when early adopters walk into meetings with their new gizmos they tend to derail e meetings. But I have been finding that more and more I am using it for actual productive things. I have Ben printing out requirement documents and reviewing them on the bus on the way home, so far I have used goodreader, and connect to review documents.

I find PDF to be the most reliable format for presentation, word documents get a little messed up with tables and charts so I have been printing to PDF. As you all know, I'm pretty cheap so I didn't buy pages or numbers so I am stuck with read only. Today i downloaded iAnnotate PDF which is an application dedicated to the viewing and annotating of PDF files, it's really good at what it does I'll tell you that. At 6.99 it's a pretty good deal and would be even better ( here he goes again my regulars will say, offering his unsolicited opinion on how to make things better) if it had some key changes made..

To get a document onto the device you have to have a "server" read computer that has a application installed and running on it, not so bad, but it doesn't run as a service, flaw number 1. Also when minimized it doesn't disappear into your task bar. Once you have set that up and shared a folder you can then transfer files. Opening the files is fine, if a lit more cumbersome than some of the other apps out there and once open you can annotate to your hearts content. You can Ed line, strike out, put notes, Hightower light, it really is quite remarkable what you can achieve, the only thing you cant do is change the contents of the file...:)

Now once done with the annotations you have to open the dialog again and upload your comments to the server in order to make them visible. I had checked an option on the server somewhere to replace the original so that might be a superfluous step in my case, but haven't had that much time to play with it yet.

So if it could pull docs and upload docs from google, or another cloud service, automatically upload my comments once I close the document or have some other fast acting button to sync the doc, it would be a replacement for two of the apps i currently have. Without that, I am still using connect to pull from google, and then using this to annotate when I find the need to annotate... Still lightyears ahead of where I was, oh, yesterday...;)