TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

You can read PDFs on your iPhone, and read them well, says Palm-mac

By Paul Biba

Murray Alexander’s Palm-Mac blog is one of the best gadget blogs on the web. Murray is also very particular and doesn’t praise anything unless he really likes it. So I was amazed when he actually recommended an app to read PDFs on the iPhone. If Murray says it works, then it works. I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting most of his blog post in full, so to make it easier to read I’ll leave out the blockquotes.

GoodReader for iPhone

Since my Palm days I have always liked to carry around a load of pdf files, mostly used for work but also for a bit of home stuff. My app of choice on the Palm platform was Repligo and since moving to the iPhone I have found it hard to get something that I thought was as good as Repligo. Last week however I downloaded GoodReader and have been impressed with it since to the point where I now think it is in fact a better programme. …

As with a lot of apps for the platform and with Apple being a pain in the butt as regards access to internal bits and bobs, getting your files across onto the device is a bit tiresome. The manual says that files can be emailed across and there are instructions on the developer web site so I will give that a bash too. I will also need to follow the instructions in this link to try out the software which claims to allow usb file transfer…if it works I will let you know. Updated…by Jove, it does work! 2nd Update…the email process looks a right royal pain in the butt and now that I can transfer via USB I won’t need to bother with that method luckily.

Once the files are on the iPhone they can be easily organised into folders and sub-folders of any folder. You then just cut and paste them into the preferred folder. Simple. The app has a very clean, uncluttered and classic iPhone interface which I like with all folders appearing on the opening screen. I have about 30 files in there already including some biggies. The MacBook Pro manual is around 2.7mb in size but opens unbelievably quickly with little delay as you tap the screen hotspots to perform commands such as turn the next page or return to the home page. In fact once the document is opened there is no delay in moving to the next page. Very impressive speed wise. You can also pinch to increase the view, make bookmarks, rotate to landscape view, password lock files, view txt files, go directly to a page number in a pdf, view other files including iWork 08 and 09, Office files and more.

This application is really easy to use and displays the actual PDF very well. It is so adjustable that you will always find a method of viewing the document in an ideal manner. It offers true full screen viewing by allowing the option of dispensing with onscreen buttons and the search facility can come in very handy too.

This is an app that comes highly recommened if you need to view a lot of pdf stuff.