Entries tagged with apps

I’ve been using google docs a lot lately due to the various devices and computers that I’ve been using. It keeps me from having to connect everything together. Documents to Go allows you to work with google docs (along with several other cloud syncing services like drop box and the like, but I haven’t used those so I don’t know if they work well). You have to by the premium edition (which costs $5 more).

The thing is that it doesn’t quite keep all the formatting. Here’s a document that I started in Docs2Go.

This is a document that I created in Docs2Go with the built in tabs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t transfer over.

The alternative is just to do spaces instead of using the tab. The indent on google docs defaults to 4 spaces. So if you do four spaces in docs2go, it’ll transfer over. If you download it back into Word, the four spaces are still there. You can just write a macro to search and replace the four spaces and reformat the document so that the first line of each paragraph indents a certain amount. It’s a little bit of a pain and an extra step, but it’s the only solution that I’ve got.

The good thing about this combination is that docs2go allows you to work on the documents offline and then sync it afterwards.

I know that quick office also has the ability to could sync, but I haven’t used that one in a while, so I can’t talk about how well that works with google docs.

Though there are formatting issues between these two programs, it’s not enough for me to go out and look for another program. Let me know if you’ve used other programs that work better with google docs.

I am using Documents to Go to do all of my writing and editing. I had it on the iphone so I could look at documents sent to me via work. All the documents I received were in word or excel format and I never had any problems. I also read several manuscripts this way.

I didn’t notice a problem until I tried to download an rtf of a manuscript. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t download the file.

This is from the native ipad mail program. When you hold down the attachment icon, a popup comes on letting you choose between open in native reader or open it in documents to go.

Not so much with RTF.

Or txt.

If you read the documentation from dataviz, you’ll see that both txt and rtf are supported files. However, it just won’t let you download from the native email client.

You can transfer txt files using the Docs2Go desktop wireless sync, which bypasses the need to boot up itunes and hook up the ipad. But it doesn’t support syncing of rtf files. I don’t even know how else to sync it, but docs2go has been around for so long that they really should have that ability, but whatever. It all became pretty moot anyway.

I downloaded the rtf to my laptop thinking that I could convert it to doc, but word just decided that it wanted to capitalize various sections of the manuscript. I was just screwed either way.

Luckily, in this strange wacky world of ours, we have choices. And those choices won’t bankrupt us. I downloaded Goodreader, which allowed me to download the rtf attachment using its internal email and managed to open it up perfectly. No funky caps in random sections. It also allows you to open docs, pdfs, txts,etc. And it only cost me $.99.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend docs2go, but it’s what I got. When reading reviews about Pages and quickoffice, it seems that they have problems of their own. So the choice seems to be between 3 evils.

If all you need is the ability to read files, from my very limited experience with goodreader, I would suggest that instead. It’s the difference between a dollar and ten.

Do you like the graphics in that photo? I did it using Photogene on the ipad. It’s $4.99 and comes with some basic photo editing options like crop, rotate, some basic filters, red-eye remover and some basic shapes. It also has the ability to put together some basic borders like the one seen above.

I had to transfer the photo from my iphone where I took it to the ipad. I did it by uploading to smugmug using smugshot. From the ipad, I browsed to the web page and downloaded from there. I hate having to connect to itunes twice just to transfer one photo.

In actuality, I had downloaded camera for ipad thinking that it was a photo transfer program, but it’s not. I misunderstood its intended use. That program connects your ipad and iphone and uses the ipad like a remote control. It’s the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. Why would you use your ipad to take a picture with your iphone? And it crashed constantly so I didn’t even get a chance to see if it worked well or what. I totally wasted $.99.