Hoisted from the “comments”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/04/the-ipad-and-pdfs-conclusions-for-now/comment-page-1/#comment-1064:

For all the great things on the iPad, file management is currently a disaster. I’ve got two different apps that can connect to my ftp server and my iDisk, but neither one can get the downloaded documents to Pages or iAnnotate. I have to use iwork.com to get files into Pages, and the desktop app for iAnnotate. If we can’t have a complete Finder on the iPad, we at least need a set of common folders that can be shared between applications.

Boy is this dead right. I can use Safari/Web Of Science or Papers on the iPad to find journal papers, but I can’t download them to the iPad and then use them with iAnnotate – I have to go to my desktop, download them, and sync them. I can comment on papers with iAnnotate, but I can’t important the comments into a Pages doc – I have to sync the annotated PDF back to the desktop, copy comments over to a doc, and then sync that back with iTunes to edit on the iPad with Pages. Geez even MS-DOS 1.0 had shared file storage.

This is way more important to me than multitasking. And in fact, I’m not even sure I care about multitasking without this.

I am trying out my iPad as a remote desktop client to my mac, my windows machine, and an appserver at UW. The net is – it works, but I would never use if for any kind of depth work.

There are a number of rdp/vnc clients for the iPad. I went with “Desktop Connect”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desktop-connect/id364907570?mt=8 because it offers both rdp (to connect to windows boxes) and vnc (to connect to my Mac) (though you can of course install vnc servers on windows and rdp servers on the mac if you want to get complicated – see “wikipedia guide to remote desktop software”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop_software. And Desktop Connect offered both for $11.99. There are a lot more expensive solutions available, this is not an app area with a lot of cheap options.

On the Mac you have to turn on your vnc server – “a slightly outdated and wrong guide to doing so”:http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vnc-server-is-included-in-mac-os-x-104/ – but it will point you in mostly the right direction. On windows you have to turn on remote access, I think this is somewhere in the computer properties page.

Anyway, all the connections worked. I’m able to remotely view my Mac, my Windows box, and the Windows box at UW I access for various pieces of engineering software. But the interplay of touch screen and mouse control is a little unnatural. Maybe there is a better way to implement it, but I found it super awkward. In this app, you either have to use the default mode in which case you have to use your finger as a mouse and drag the pointer around while keeping in constant screen contact – it is awkward. Or you tell it to act like a touch screen and the mouse pointer jumps to wherever you touch – maybe better but then some things are awkward/impossible, like the dock popping up as i drag over it on the Mac.

Net impression – in a pinch I will use this, but as a regular thing, forget it. Better off to walk upstairs to the Windows box or across the room to the Mac laptop.

Several comments have asked for my recommendations. After two days of tinkering, here is what you should do if you’d like to use your iPad to read and annotate PDFs.

* get the “iAnnotate”:http://itunes.apple.com/app/iannotate-pdf/id363998953?mt=8 app. Its UI needs a lot of work, downloading and uploading are clumsy, but it does a fine job of letting you read PDFs and annotate them, and those annotations are usable back on your Mac/PC. * install the “iAnnotate PDF service”:http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/index.html on your Mac or PC. This is a lightweight server that passes PDFs back and forth between your desktop and the iPad. Just point it at the directory where you have your PDFs on your desktop. * on the iPad now in the iAnnotate app, you can connect to the desktop machine and download PDFs. Unfortunately one at a time. Please Ajidev, add batch transfer capability. UPDATE…hmm batch transfer seems to be happening now. Something I did wrong? Updated app? Either way, awesome. * Annotate away on the PDF. Personally I use the highlight tool to mark a section, then select the highlight and add a note. * When done annotating, upload the annotated version back to your PC. This is where the UI really blows. With the doc open in iAnnotate, hold your finger on the doc name in the upper left for a while. You will get no visual feedback. Lift your finger and a properties dialog will appear with an upload option. Upload away. * Back on your mac/pc, your annotated doc will be in your pdf directory with the words “annotated” appended to the name.

This isn’t bad. It is all very functional. I’ve done 15 papers already and it is becoming natural. How can it be better?

* Integration with Web of Science or other paper sources. The Papers app on the iPad promises to let you download papers directly from WEb of Science and others (tho I can’t make it work with the UW ezproxy settings). This would be very nice. * Integration with endnote??? I don’t know about this. I use Endnote Web within Web of Science and that works fine, I don’t know what else I need. * Integration with Pages. Would be awesome to be able to slurp annotations and citations into the Pages app. * Integration with Papers on the Mac? Don’t know, I’ve just installed Papers, and while I like its organization features, the lack of annotation capabilities makes me wonder if I will ever bother with it.

I finally officially matriculated last fall as a part time grad student at UW and am studying nanoengineering. For the moment I am sited in the mechanical engineering department tho I could just have easily been in the electrical engineering department, materials science department, chemistry, physics, or several other places. And in fact I am taking no traditional mechanical engineering courses, but am entirely focused on nanoscale problems and technology.

My long term interest is in industrial-scale production of nanoscale devices. Many great things have been made in the labs, but to scaling up to industrial scale production requires discovery of methods to automatically produce and assemble nanoscale devices, accepting the inherent error levels in these devices. Photolithography has been an amazing technology for creating computer chips but is a top-down approach – the entire chip is exactly designed and then carved out of silicon. The next wave of devices at the nanoscale will be organically assembled bottoms-up and there are whole new classes of problems to solve.

I’ve been reading a ton on nanowires and carbon nanotubes and the manipulation of them via various methods. And also thinking on the side about chip/circuit architecture based on these inexact, nondeterministic elements. Just got a pointer to “RelXLayer”:http://www.cra.org/ccc/xlayer.php which is a nice launch point for thinking about.

One of primary use cases I am testing out on the iPad is reading and annotating PDFs. I am in the process of reviewing 200-300 papers on nanowire/nanotube manipulation via electric fields. Printing them all out would be horrendous and unwieldy – I did print the first 30 and it was a 2 inch stack of paper.

If I could replace 20 inches of paper in my bag with an iPad, that would be awesome. Obviously I need to be able to annotate, extract annotations, etc. Major pluses would be easy downloading from Web of Science searches, and integration with Endnote.

Attempt 1: iAnnotate PDF from AjiDev on the iPad. To make this work, you install a little server app on your Mac/Windows machine and point it at all your PDFs (which you downloaded previously from Web of Science, no integration with, sigh). Then on the iPad, you pull all the papers over (1 at a time, yuck) in the iAnnotate app (the developers say they hope to improve this once they have more time with the iPad). You can then annotate, and upload the annotated papers. Pros: this all actually works, I have done my first 5 papers, I can see living with this. Cons: no integration with Web of Science or EndNote, no integration with Pages on the iPad (that would be killer). And the UI of iAnnotate is incredibly obtuse. Dialogs, toolbars, ribbons, popups, with key commands sprinkled through them all with no rhyme or reason. Figuring out how to upload my annotations took forever (when you have an annotated doc open, hold your finger on the doc name for a while, when you let up a properties dialog will appear, and there is an upload button there).

Attempt 2: Papers by mekentosj. OK this looks so freaking promising but I have been dashed on the rocks. Papers has direct integration with Web of Science and many other paper search tools, and I have tried to set up access. Access is tricky because Web of Science access is limited to subscribing institutions, so you have to go through an institutional proxy, in my case UW. I can configure the logon correctly and see the Web of Science webpage in the app and do searches in the webpage etc. But I can’t get the ezproxy setup right which allows the Papers UI to do searches and downloads. This would be so awesome but I am failing. Apparently if I buy Papers for MacOSX it will automagically sync my collection so that is up next.

UPDATE: OK so I bought Papers for MacOSX and now have tried that. The good news – sync between Mac and iPad is great, much better than iAnnotate. The Mac Papers interface is very nice for organizing PDFs, tagging them, keeping track of read/unread, etc. HOWEVER you don’t seem to be able to markup PDFs in the Mac app or in the iPad. You can add global comments to a paper but no highlighting etc. This is a major downer.

Really really slow on first sync. I’ve purchased a ton of iPhone apps over time and the iPad insists on installing all of them, even crappy ones that I have uninstalled.

* Kudos to: The calendar app is gorgeous. The Book app is beautiful but so what, I’ll still read most books on the Kindle, and the Kindle app looks good. Zillow looks nice. Wordpress app has been nicely rewritten. Soundhound looks good. Wolfram alpha looks good and at the new pricing, is now a reasonable buy.

* Yawns: The Mail app, blah, nothing really new. Maps, disappointing, nothing new.

* Disappointments: almost all games, few have been ported: Civ Rev and Catan, this is your chance. 2 across, I may have to find a new nytimes crossword app. Facebook?

* Need a great texting app, the first two I tried sucked.

I am working now to download a bunch of PDFs to evaluate the device as a PDF review/annotation tool. iannotate from ajidev is the tool.

Looking at choices for an electric for use around our property. Basically I think the choice comes down to these:

* “Cunningham”:http://www.cunninghamgolfcar.com/p-225-xrt-850-electric-utility-vehicle.aspx. Lacks a certain spirit, but comes in well under the price of most the others. Basically a golf cart manufacturer, I’d be concerned about torque on crappy surfaces and inclines. * “X-Treme”:http://www.x-tremescooters.com/utvs/xu3000/xu3000.html. Plenty of attitude but doesn’t really exist yet. * “Bad Boy Buggies”:http://www.badboybuggies.com/products.php. Perhaps too much attitude – Camo the only paint option. And I think they will come to regret that name. * “Polaris Ranger EV”:http://www.polarisindustries.com/en-us/ATV-RANGER/2010/Mid-Size-Utility-Vehicles/RANGER-EV/Pages/Overview.aspx. Not the cheapest, might be the way to go tho, you can actually find these at dealers around here.

Lots of other regional choices. A concern I’ve heard is battery life in our moist climate, will be interesting to see how that works out.

Yesterday was a brutal technology day. First, I wedged my Kindle between my rear and a chair and heard a nasty “crack”. My Kindle display has a nice shattery image on it permanently now. Sad. I had to open a paper book last night. New Kindle arrived today (thanks to Amazon Fresh trucks), and because the content is all stored at Amazon, I had my full library back working in less than a day. It sucks that e-readers are fragile (well I do weigh >200 lbs so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the Kindle’s failure, it is not sold as a stadium chair), but back and running fast.

Second, the battery failed on one of our Macbooks which is about 3 years old. But of course Apple replaced for free at the Genius bar. Because they replaced the motherboard a year ago under some dubious warranty claim after we dropped the machine, again for no charge. Really, why would a regular human buy a machine anywhere else?

Third – every week, I update a task list document on Google Docs for a mission-critical subcontractor we use, print/save as PDF, and email to the sub. It is not a complex doc but it does need to be right. Last night Google Docs kept failing during the PDF save process (which is also how to print from Google Docs, so this is a pretty important function). After many tries it worked and I forwarded the downloaded PDF to my sub without examining it. Disaster – the PDF was for the version of the task list from January 24! The sub got all the wrong materials and did the wrong things totally, I had to scramble today to patch things back up.

I use the intrinsic functions in google docs to datestamp my doc, and the delivered PDF had the january 24 datestamp in it, and the content in the pdf is completely different than what is in my current doc on google docs, and i assume is a faithful representation of the state of the doc on january 24. how did google deliver me this pdf? My best guess is that some part of the PDF rendering process failed badly in the Google server farm, and they restored from some earlier version, and the restore picked up old queued files. I really have no idea how they could have delivered a two month old PDF rendering of my doc.

Corruption of data and inability to faithfully print documents are pretty damning problems for an office suite. I really can’t imagine continue to using Google docs with this class of problem. I haven’t bothered to file a bug with google yet because, well, delivering a product with this level of data corruption for basic scenarios is pretty much a deal breaker for me.

Commendations to Apple and Amazon for creating systems and businesses that are incredibly customer-focused, even when products fail. The Google Docs failure may be an isolated incident, but I do wonder if Google has this same level of customer focus.

• “Relentless”:amazon by Dean Koontz. Koontz writes light horror books – humorous, at times scary, a little grotesque, ultimately uplifting. He seems like he’d be a nice guy to have lunch with. Amazon says 3.5 stars, sounds right.
• “Land of Marvels”:amazon by Barry Unsworth. Lust in all it’s forms – for a woman, for glory, for power, for money, for empire – collide in pre WWI Mesopotamia with predictably disastrous results. Good but not great tale. Amazon says 4 stars, might be a bit rich.
• “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”:amazon by Alan Bradley. Excellent mystery starring a very unusual precocious 11-year-old detective. Not very believable but I was totally sucked in. Amazon says 4.5 stars, I loved the book.
• “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”: amazon by Tom Robbins. I hate farce and so didn’t finish this. I tried. It does seem well written but I can’t get past the absurdity. Amazon says 3.5 stars, I’d say .5.

Nice to see the Buckeyes wrap up the Big10 title in dominating fashion, onto the dance! And especially nice to wipe out Minnesota, too bad they weren’t knocked out of the tourney altogether. Why the hatred for the hapless Gophers? It all goes back to this incident, which pretty much flattened the OSU program for the next 10 years and ended Witte’s career. The Minnesota thugs got wrist slaps, Winfield went on to a successful baseball career which always galled me.

Here’s hoping the Gophers flame out in their first game.

“ESPN’s tool”:http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/frontpage is super easy to use. Can make picks first time right from the ESPN main page.

“SI”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/ncaa/mens-tournament/?eref=sinav – where is your brain? Shoving me to Facebook and forcing me to let some other random Facebook app smash through my privacy wall? Wow this seems dumb dumb dumb. How can a sports media site let fantasy sports activity slip off their site??

“CBS Sports”:http://mayhem.cbssports.com/splash/mayhem/spln/opc/free?tag=railLeftContent;fantasyGamesCol also good, easy to enter, also a nice bracket manager for your own pool. They have a facebook thingy too but it is an optional side thing, much more rational.

“Foxsports”:http://mayhem.cbssports.com/splash/mayhem/spln/opc/free?tag=railLeftContent;fantasyGamesCol. Visually clumsy – orange, too much Hootersness, and the bracket layout is hard to parse. Not my fav. Oh and registration seemed more onerous.

“Yahoosports”:http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/ seems good, nice bracket manager too.

Ok well the day arrived. I can’t quite figure out what the ipad is for. I still need to carry my iPhone for phone calls. I still need to carry my MacBook Pro for real software – Matlab, Mathematica, Aperture, LaTEX-heavy docs. I’ll still carry the Kindle for its awesome battery life. Would I carry the iPad as well??? Or are there occasional trips where I’d carry instead of the MacBook Pro?

Or maybe it is for the couch at home. But usually I again need to run real software. So what is this thing for?

So I only ordered one.

* “Typhoon”:amazon by Charles Cumming. I really liked this tale, suspense set in China over the last 15 years, with some nicely shaded characters. Amazon says just 3.5 stars, but I’m at least 4 stars, I would pick up another book by the author in a heartbeat. * “Invisible”:amazon by Paul Auster. Quite a twisted little tale of a very evil and manipulative man working his way through a set of lives. And a very nice structure to the tale, raises the book above your typical mystery. I’ve had several Austers on the shelf for a while, very worth the time. Amazon says 4 stars, I’m good with that. * “The Private Patient”:amazon by P.D. James. This one feels to me like it is the dead zone between a good mystery yarn and literature. The author aspires to write a deeper more thoughtful tale but is just boring. Doubt I will finish. Amazon says 4 stars but really not close.

Just back from a stay in West Hollywood. Stayed at “Le Parc Suites”:http://www.leparcsuites.com/. I think this place had its best moments 10 years ago. Not terrible, the service levels were good, the street is nice, but the facility is aging and probably wasn’t great to start with.

From walking around, where we should have stayed (kitchen a requirement): * “Palihouse”:http://www.palihouse.com/suites.asp?st=5. Looks very cool and good kitchens. Not as nice a street location as Le Parc but looks way awesomer. * “Petit Ermitage”:http://www.petitermitage.com/home.php. Also full kitchens.

Close but lacking a real kitchen: * “LeMontrose Suite Hotel”:http://www.lemontrose.com/accommodations/amenities.php. Kitchenette type facilities * “Chamberlain”:http://www.chamberlainwesthollywood.com/accommodations/index.html. Kitchenette as well in some rooms

• Congrats USC Lax on Sunday’s win over UW! Great to see all of you http://bit.ly/dsWpcF #
• Hear hear RT @th73: I get gov subsidies for not farming on Facebook RT @ChrisPirillo: I just became the mayor of I’m not on FourSquare. #
• Search for “drugstore” on iPhone google maps and I get this? http://twitpic.com/13st7z #
• Oregon 2009 backfield – most felonious ever? http://tinyurl.com/y9ys4vr #
• Recent books — Freedom, Give Me Liberty, Judas Unchained, Forgotten Man – http://bit.ly/bciszU #
• Awesome – http://5z8.info/38–start.spamBot–this-ip–_p4i1f_molotovcocktail #
• Advice to hoteliers: biz center PCs should prob not have null password on admin account #

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