ReaddleDocs, Readdle‘s file manager and document viewer for the iPad, has relaunched today as Documents, a free update for existing customers that introduces a refreshed interface and some new features.

In terms of functionalities, Documents basically shares the same capabilities of ReaddleDocs. The app can open the same file types, it can organize items in folders, sort them, and display them in icon view or list view. Unlike the OS X Finder, sub-folders in List view aren’t opened in the same column, but they’ll require you to open a different view that will display a Back button with the name of first level. As with ReaddleDocs, buttons to create a new folder, sort by name/date/size, and change views are displayed in a bar at the top that you can reveal by swiping down. A shortcut to create a new text file has been placed in a sidebar that you can reveal by hitting the Edit button.

To understand what Documents does, you can read our original review of ReaddleDocs 3 for the iPad. There are a series of web services supported by the app (including Dropbox) that you can access in the Network tab on the left. In the sidebar, the app also offers access to iCloud storage (which doesn’t come with List view), a built-in browser (to download webpages or part of them just like ReaddleDocs 3), and “Recents”. This last section provides quick access to the last five opened documents: as you re-open one, it will go to the top of the list again. (more…)

Adobe today released its popular Adobe Reader PDF reading application for iOS devices; the software, available for free on the App Store, runs natively on the iPhone and iPad as a universal app. Back in August, Adobe released CreatePDF for iOS, a utility to turn a variety of documents into Reader-compatible PDF files that preserved quality and accessibility standards with the inclusion of links, images, and footnotes. With the release of Adobe Reader today, Adobe is giving iOS users two tools to create and properly read PDF documents, respectively.

Adobe says that Reader for iOS works with several PDF document types, including PDF Portfolios, password-protected PDF documents and Adobe LiveCycle rights-managed PDF files. Upon first launch, the app opens a document view with a Getting Started.pdf file ready to be viewed to get familiar with the app’s UI and controls. A scrubber bar along the bottom lets you quickly skim through pages, which can be displayed “continuously” in the reading view, or through a single-page visualization that will let you scroll horizontally between pages. You can pinch or double-tap to zoom, and rendering performances on zoomed documents seemed fairly decent on my iPhone 4. In PDF documents, text can be selected and copied to the clipboard, or you can search using the icon in the upper toolbar; a bookmarks icon in the bottom bar enables you to quickly navigate the sections of a document. One nice touch of Adobe Reader are “tap zones”, which in Single Page mode let you jump back and forward by tapping on the left and right edges of a document.

PDF files can be emailed using Adobe Reader, opened with another app using the “Open In” menu, or printed through Apple’s AirPrint. According to Adobe, Reader for iOS is capable of viewing PDF Portfolios, PDF Packages, annotations and drawing markups as well as reading text annotations like sticky notes. In my tests, performances with a 350-page PDF document were similar to Apple’s iBooks, which can also preview PDFs. iBooks was slightly faster at page animations and rendering text while zooming on a document — the app has indeed been recently updated with bug fixes and performance improvements.

If you need to preview specific PDF documents that might have some compatibility issues with iBooks, Adobe Reader on iOS might be a good choice. You can download the app for free on the App Store.

Ted Landau at The Mac Observer covers an issue I’ve mentioned several times in the past, which Apple has partially fixed with the last releases of iOS: saving documents and moving them across apps. Specifically, Landau notes that the lack of a “universal save” option for documents that can be read by third-party apps (PDFs, text files, images) leads to an annoying and pretty much useless duplication of content. Apple has implemented an “Open In…” menu to send files to other apps, but the file that’s being sent is a copy. iOS apps can’t read and modify a source file from a single location.

Currently, iOS does not come close to matching the advantages of Mac OS X here. There is no way to have a unifying folder in iOS that contains related documents from different apps. There is no way to have a document easily opened in different apps, where any changes you make in one app are instantly accessible by all the compatible apps. You can come closer with Dropbox, but closer is not good enough here.

That’s annoying for me, too, as I constantly switch between apps to get my work done, and it’s not like I don’t enjoy trying new ones. This typically leads to some sort of geek frustration — why can’t Apple build an invisible layer that lets Elements edit a text document from Evernote and Pages access the same file?

For Ted and me, yes, being able to avoid file duplication and tedious exporting processes would be nice. But I do wonder how much does Apple care about such functionalities considering the underlying paradigms of iOS and the upcoming iCloud functionalities of iOS 5. For one, Apple really cares about application sandboxing: each app has its own controlled data environment and only a few items can be shared between multiple apps. Apple cares about sandboxing so much that they’re bringing it to the Mac App Store. Would iOS sandboxing allow for a source file to be edited and “saved” by multiple apps? Where does that file belong to, technically? Would iOS apps be able to write specific metadata to it? And what happens if, hypothetically, this “shared” file needs to be pushed back and forth with iCloud?

I’m no iOS developer, but I can see this proposed “universal save” model becoming an issue when on iOS, unlike the Mac, there’s no visible, centralized Finder location to write and read files from. In fact, Ted is right when he says that the convenience of a Mac is being able to create “a folder that will contain all the assorted files needed to put his column together”. That’s made easy by the Finder — but on iOS? Apple allows third-party developers to plug into the Music library or Camera Roll, yet there’s no Apple app to “create text file here” or “save webpage from Safari here”. Again, the lack of an iOS Finder would require “universal save” to work inside any app. iDisk could have been a centralized location for files — it could have even been Apple’s “answer to Dropbox” — but it’s not going to be supported by iCloud.

And then there’s the conceptual issue of an iOS device being the app that you’re using. When you use Pages on an iPad, the iPad is a word processor. When you browse the web with Safari, you’re holding the web in your hands. On a technical level, this app console model is represented by sandboxing and one-way “Open In” menus, and soon iCloud-based documents that allow multiple versions of the same app to access files. Would a “universal save” option somehow break the illusion that you’re holding an app, reminding us that we’re using a device with multiple layers of abstractions including a filesystem?

I don’t know. I believe I’d like this feature in theory, but I wonder if there would also be a considerable trade-off to accept.

9to5mac reports “a source at Apple” informed them the company is working on a native “Scanner” app for iOS devices, which would allow users to use an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad camera to scan documents or business cards on the go, and have them recognized & exported as PDF, or to other iOS apps like Pages and Contacts. The report says “it isn’t certain” when this app will be released and if it will be directly bundled into a future version of iOS, however the website suggests such scanning functionality would require a better camera other than the existing 5 MP one on the iPhone 4. The iPhone 5 is widely expected to have an 8 MP camera.

The user opens the app and holds the iPhone over the document or object they want scanned.  They then snap a picture of it.  Apple’s on-board software then resizes the image to ‘letter’ or business card, A4 or whatever depending on original document.  Resizing includes aligning edges that get skewed by a single scan point rather than traditional scanning methods.  The user can then manually change the size of the document or the use.

This “Scanner” app would also use either local / cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) to separate images from text and make scanned text available for copying and pasting across iOS applications. Notably, iOS comes with an “Open in…” menu that enables third-party and native apps to communicate with each other’s supported documents and file types — 9to5mac does suggest the Scanner app would be capable of scanning a business card, and automatically add a new entry to the Contacts app.

There are a number of apps in the App Store that can turn iOS devices into portable scanners, some of them we’ve reviewed on MacStories before. Apple has also been granted a series of patents related to a possible scanning functionality for mobile devices.

PDF Expert by Readdle is my favorite app to collect, read, and annotate PDF documents on the iPad, and thanks to a series of updates in the past months it’s also become a solid alternative to iBooks on the iPhone, not to mention support for signatures and text notes. With the major 3.0 update released today, free for existing iPad customers, Readdle has completely revamped the user interface of PDF Expert, adding a new toolbar for annotations, notes, drawing shapes on screen and highlighters, as well as a “page manager” to act on single pages within a document, copy them, export them, and move them with drag & drop.

The new toolbar in PDF Expert for iPad is easily dismissible with a tap on the “x” button, so you won’t have to look at it all the time while you’re reading a document. Similarly, a single tap on the edit icon in the upper toolbar (the one that contains navigation buttons, the new Recents menu, search, bookmarks, and sharing options) will display the annotation toolbar again. You can manually highlight text or use the automated tools for highlights, underlines and strikethroughs; you can add shapes, notes, your signatures, and choose from a variety of free-hand highlighters with different colors. Changes can be reverted at any time, and I haven’t noticed any visible slowdown when navigating annotated documents with hundreds of pages.

The new toolbar is clean and unobtrusive, but it gets better with the new Page Manager. With a tap on the pages button, you can switch to a bird’s eye view of all your document’s pages with live previews (that is, thumbnails include annotations and highlights). You can add a blank page between existing pages, select one and move it around — even select multiple ones, rearrange them, rotate them, email them, and extract them as a new document in PDF Expert’s main section. Live previews update fast on the iPad 2, and the “extract” function is undoubtedly useful if you need to focus on specific pages of a document.

PDF Expert 3.0 is a great update that improves both design and usability, whilst adding some other “little gems” you can check out in the app’s built-in update guide. PDF Expert for iPad is available at $9.99 on the App Store. (more…)

A new patent detailed by Patently Apple today illustrates how Apple may implement file sharing between iOS devices in future versions of the iPhone and iPad. Whilst patent filings are no indication of features and hardware design choices coming in the next versions of operating systems and devices, they provide some sort of insight into what Apple engineers and designers have been researching to improve the technology or user experience. This latest patent offers a (possible) interesting solution to a common problem that have always affected owners of multiple iOS devices: it’s not easy to share files between them wirelessly, without a cable, without a computer. Whereas iCloud and the PC-Free initiative will focus on fixing this by cutting the cable requirement and constantly syncing documents between apps both on iOS and OS X, there are still some use cases in which a user might want to share a file quickly without uploading to iCloud first. Or, then again, owners of different devices with different iCloud accounts might find difficult to share files in seconds without having to rely on classic email or social sharing.

The patent details a technology that is capable of beaming files back and forth between devices thanks to “file sharing gestures” such as the “pouring motion” or regular flicks and swipes that will give users the illusion of throwing files off a screen, and onto a second device. With sound effects (Patently Apple reports the “vacuum cleaner” one) and animations, this new system sounds like an evolution of webOS’ existing “Touch to Share” feature that allows smartphones and the TouchPad to share, for example, webpages by simply touching each other’s screen. Apple’s proposed solution takes this idea a step further with the concept of animations, user gestures and file selection in-app to give users more control and “personality” over what’s being shared, and how.

Apple’s solution begins by stating that a user could make an intuitive, physical gesture with a first device, which could then be detected by one or more onboard motion sensors. The detected motion triggers an animation having a “physics metaphor,” where the object appears to react to forces in a real world, physical environment.

Apple’s patent spends a lot of time describing various animated physics metaphors that would have the iOS device’s interface react differently depending on the metaphor. Apple describes that the appearance of the interface could react to gravity, friction or drag, momentum, torque, acceleration, centripetal forces or any other force found in the real-world physical environment. The rate at which each object moves on an interface could be based on the size or “mass” of the file represented by the object. Larger files that have more “mass” could have their object animated to move slower in the interface while smaller files that have less “mass” could have their object animated to move faster in the interface.

The patent also details scenarios such as having iOS devices at work or school, and having to share files with colleagues or friends. The proposed system could scan for available iOS devices, and let users to exchange files with simple gestures. The concept reminds us of AirDrop, a new feature of OS X Lion that enables Mac owners to share files with computers nearby, provided they’ve granted authorization for incoming documents.

Last, the filings detail how these new file sharing features and commands could also be used to send files to a network, rather than a device. It is unclear from the report whether this patent is based off Apple’s rumored interest in NFC technology (admittedly, this sounds a lot like it), so make sure to hit Patently Apple to check out all the details and illustrations.

Let’s face it, if you’re a Mac user who also happens to have an iPhone, iPad, or both, chances are you’ve been there before: with two devices in hand and a computer on your desk, how do you share stuff between them? What are the apps that enable you to share content across different devices, simultaneously and perhaps over the Internet as well?

In this post I’ve collected 10 iOS apps that are making my workflow more streamlined and connected on a daily basis, but before I delve deeper into the list I think I should define the “content” from this page’s title and the kind of “stuff” I want (and need) to share. With Lion approaching its final release in July and iCloud set to deliver a state-of-the-art OTA experience for users and developers alike, it seems like Apple has taken the necessary steps to free iOS devices from the need of a cable, building new features aimed at easing the process of sharing content between different machines and devices. Take Lion as an example: AirDrop, a new menu baked into the Finder, will allow Mac users to easily share files and documents with computers (and thus friends) nearby, over a WiFi network. Or, perhaps more importantly, the new iCloud APIs with instant push and cross-platform sync will enable developers to build better applications that take advantage of the cloud to keep their data synced and always up to date with the most recent changes. Whilst services and apps have been syncing content through their own backends for years, it’s the promise of a free iCloud infrastructure from Apple that’s convincing developers to ditch third-party solutions like Dropbox to rewrite their software with iCloud in mind. We’ll see the first result in September.

So what’s the content to share? What’s the stuff I find myself needing to share across devices every day? Links, photos, screenshots, PDFs, notes — you name it: as OS X and iOS become more intertwined on each software update, data needs to easily get out from one app to another. And in spite of an iCloud on the horizon, there hasn’t been a universal solution to share anything between a Mac and an iPhone.

In this article, I take a look at 10 iOS apps and services with some sort of Mac counterparts that have helped me over the past months in getting data out of my iPad and iPhone, and onto my MacBook Pro, iMac, and the cloud in general. (more…)