![]() Kudos to the GoodReader people for resisting the temptation to inflate their price to match the screen size the way so many other developers are doing with their iPad apps. This is annoying-but on the other hand, paying for both versions will still run you less than many iPhone apps, including the $2.99 Tweetie and Reeder apps I use all the time. It is not a universal app, which means you must buy it once for each platform. The iPhone version also has three optional paid add-ons, that are also 99 cents each-for accessing POP or IMAP e-mail servers, Google Docs, and FTP servers-that can be tried at no charge from the “Lite” version and are included free in the iPad version. GoodReader currently costs 99 cents each for both the iPhone and the iPad (with a free “Lite” version, fully functional save for only being able to store 5 files at a time, available for the iPhone as well). To note, all the full-size iPad screenshots are captured at the iPad’s resolution, but may appear differently-sized to you than they would on an actual iPad screen due to variations in your monitor size. As always, click on the thumbnails to see the full-size versions. You may find it helpful to refer to my reviews covering PDF reading on the Sony and the Astak I will use a number of the same examples. This means that, unlike Air Sharing, it is fully capable of handling the 156-megabyte bloat-monster that is Spycraft 2.0. Prior to then, I used Air Sharing, which had a number of the same functions, but GoodReader has one significant advantage that kicked Air Sharing to the curb: it does not try to load the entire PDF at once, but takes it one page at a time. GoodReader has been my PDF reader of choice on the iPod Touch ever since I first discovered it about six months ago. But that opinion is even now in the process of changing, thanks to the iPad and GoodReader. Although some e-ink readers are able to display PDFs, neither of the ones I have tried so far-the Sony PRS-700 and the Astak 5” Pocket Pro-did it very well. That has been my opinion up to this point. An e-book, being meant for screen viewing, is both more and less than a PDF: more readable, but less printable. It is meant for printing and binding, not screen viewing. PDF is simply a “dehydrated” paper book: a precisely-formatted representation of what an 8.5” x 11” (in most cases) paper book produced from said file should look like. This makes reading it fairly annoying, especially for a work published in columns. When you try to view a portrait PDF on a landscape PC screen, you get the upper one third to one half, then when you page down you get more. Most PDFs are not actually meant for on-screen viewing. It’s an electronic representation of a paper book, and that is just not the same thing. People call it one, and pretend it is, but it really is not. ![]()
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