I need to read several journal articles today and begin writing my speakers’ notes for my macworld talk. Ack. So, I wanted to read my friend, Dr. Nancy Smith’s dissertation on the use of mobile devices in the university classroom on my iPad. There are so many ways to move documents that it took me awhile to remember that to get a PDF on my iPad for reading in iBooks I needed to drop the PDF onto my iTunes and then hook up my iPad and sync my iPad to my macbook air using iTunes. So, after doing all of that imagine my disappointment when I discovered that I could not annotate or mark up the PDF in iBooks. Hmm. Just passive reading in iBooks. Damn.

I already had the PDF on my dropbox so I thought I’d try to use something like GoodReader. Lord help me, they’ve updated it to use iCloud but I have no idea how to use my dropbox with it. FAIL. So I went directly to the Dropbox app, found the file and hoped that there’d be an option for me to select which app to view it with. Ha! No luck. I got another generic PDF reader with no annotation enabled. Then I remembered that Circus Ponies’ Notebook app (for both the mac and iPad) imports the PDF either as a file to be clicked and viewed, or as a annotated pages. So I dropped the 184 page dissertation into Notebook on my mac, imported as annotated pages, saved it onto my dropbox folder and then opened it up all ready for reading and marking up on my iPad. I had four other articles that i wanted to review so I created a separate Notebook file, and dropped four other PDFs into their own separate tabbed sections of the Notebook. Talk about having a powerful tool and not knowing about it.