My favorite app: GoodReader
Whenever I get my wife hooked on a paper book — as I have with “Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing”, which I enjoyed first and now she’s enjoying — I get to use the family iPad as we ride stationary bikes at the gym.
Last night, I peddled through R Cookbook. Since I’ve written programs in R, I’m not learning a ton from R Cookbook, but it is a good refresher and the material is clearly presented, with illustrative examples. In the 36 hours I’ve had it, I’ve already read through well over half the book in just a few hours, so there’s not a lot of advanced material for people who’ve used R before, but it’s a worthwhile refresher and reference at $16 (after 50% off from an O'Reilly coupon I found online).
The only paid app I’ve purchased (other than stuff for our kids) is GoodReader, a terrific app for reading PDFs. I’ve stuffed GoodReader with books on Git, Ruby, Selenium, RSpec, Rails, Vim, R, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Node.js, shell scripting, Apache, statistics, and more. And I can carry the tall “stack” of books with me anywhere and search for whatever function or concept I need. It’s also lighter than holding a tech manual while riding an exercise bike.
My only complaint is Apple’s proprietary operating system and file system. I should be able to attach the iPad to my (Linux) laptop and copy my PDFs to a folder on the iPad for viewing later. Instead, the easiest method I’ve found is to copy my PDFs from my laptop to the public directory of one of my Apache servers and then download the file into GoodReader by typing the URL. It’s a hassle. That’s Apple’s fault, not GoodReader’s. But openness and hackability will definitely be big factors when deciding on our family’s second tablet.
Posted by James on Tuesday, June 07, 2011