A lazy question to mark the beginning of summer:
Suppose an academic were to (a) succumb to Apple’s marketing prowess and (b) invest a great deal of time and energy researching/discovering the best ways to make use of his/her new iPad 2, what would be the most valuable information s/he would learn, particularly regarding which apps to get?
I’m primarily interested in using the iPad to read and take notes on books and journal articles, and take it that iAnnotate is (one of) the best apps for that. But I’m also interested in suggestions about the iPad’s capabilities that are not so obvious, i.e., things someone who doesn’t have much time for (b) wouldn’t even think to look for.
Lazy answer, courtesy of the library staff at MIT. Really, a greatly useful site:
http://libguides.mit.edu/apps
I use this one on computer, but I’m guessing the ipad version is cool:
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle-ipad/
Is this too obvious?
http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/
Reference management, annotations, etc. Syncs well with Macs. Mendeley Research Networks also has good ipad/iphone apps.
Thanks for the useful suggestions — I’m at heart a Luddite, but I’m trying to get over it.
I used them (the original iPads) with my seminar this past term. Obviously the most helpful thing was not having to print anything out. All of the articles and most of the books were available electronically, and we were able to read them and mark them up on the iPad. At first we used iAnnotate but we found GoodReader worked better. (iAnnotate could not properly handle PDFs which had been scanned in “sideways”–rotating the iPad itself to right the document would result in the document rotating around again, and locking the rotation on the iPad meant that iAnnotate’s controls and labels would be off by 90 degrees). We used a shared DropBox folder for the readings and handouts. Pages is okay as a basic word processor. Save2PDF is a good PDF maker. I think if we had had the iPad2s we would have tried videoconferencing with philosophers elsewhere.
I have begun using EverNote as an organizational tool — it is good if you are managing various projects and you want to be able to clip and tag websites, documents, emails, photos. Things, which is a virtual to do list, is good, too.