PDF Expert 4 vs iAnnotate 2.1 vs Goodreader 3 – 2012 indepth review

I know it has been a long time coming, but here it is, a review on the most popular 3 PDF Editing programs for the iPad. I have been contemplating on how to compare the 3 apps for a few days now – how to set it out etc on wordpress, so this may be a bit messy if you are trying to read it; I will do my best to make it as legible and succinct as possible. The 3 apps being compared are all in their latest versions (PDF Expert just released version 4, iAnnotate released 2.1 a couple of weeks ago).

You can find them here:

PDF Expert 4 ($9.99 USD)

iAnnotate 2.1 ($9.99 USD)

GoodReader 3 ($4.99 USD)

NB: Price varies in different countries for the apps – I paid more in AUD for them.

The review is actually long and tedious – If you are after something quick, I suggest looking at the pictures and reading the conclusion down the bottom

Update: As requested, I have added examples of the export options of each app and what they look like on desktop. Currently using Adobe Acrobat Reader X

1. iAnnotate – Interface to move/rename/email files. You can drag & drop files to delete etc (as shown). Note: You can’t rename/move files that are synced to servers.

2. GoodReader – You can’t view/browse files whilst syncing is in progress. Backgound middle right in grey gives options to move/rename/email/zip files.

3. PDF Expert – Syncing (bottom left) & organising files in concert is possible. Its clean look with options to move/email/zip files are a lot easier on the eyes.

4. PDF Expert Thumb view & Drag n Drop are new in v4 (already available in iAnnotate, however) – but it makes organising/moving files easier.

5. iAnnotate – Syncing & executing other tasks is possible. Search is off to the side, but bulky highlighted term is a turn off. It also searches annotations.

6. PDF Expert – Search is similar to iAnnotate but is a popup menu, & annotated terms are also searched. The whole text edit option here is simple and neat.

7. Goodreader – a variety of text editing options to choose from. The preset font size is handy. Callout, fill, border & cloudy options are unique Goodreader.

8. Goodreader – Adding text is a major turn off! Text window takes up half the screen (usually the important half), and there is only 1 font!

9. iAnnotate – Font option overwhelms top right corner. Rotate & stamp features are unique. Note annotation (“eg counter offer is offeree…”) in blue is missing.

10. Goodreader Zoom in tool – Magnifies where you want to write & allows you to write as per usual. Palm rest included also (grey bar on bottom). Best of 3.

11. GoodReader handwriting toolbar – clean and simple. Has various useful adjustments you can make your handwritten or drawn notes/diagrams.

12. PDF Expert – Preset pens at the top very practical. You can also change & save the colour, brush size and opacity. Clean and simple.

13. iAnnotate – Handwriting Tool – can choose from a spectrum of colours, adjust opacity & brush sizes. Takes up 1/3 of the screen… Also has custom stamp tool!

14. iAnnotate customisable toolbar – have the option to preset your own tools – I’ve set some of mine (note the 5 different typewriters for 5 different size fonts).

15. iAnnotate Eg 1 iPad

16. iAnnotate Eg 1 Desktop

17. iAnnotate Eg 2 iPad

18. iAnnotate Eg 2 Deskotp

19. Goodreader Eg 1 iPad

20. Goodreader Eg 1 Desktop

21. Goodreader Eg 2 iPad

22. Goodreader Eg 2 Desktop

23. PDF Expert Eg 1 iPad

24. PDF Expert Eg 1 Desktop

25. PDF Expert Eg 2 iPad

26. PDF Expert Eg 2 Desktop

27. iAnnotate extracts & compiles full pages with annotations into pdf file

28. PDF Expert Email options

29. PDF Expert export options

30. PDF Expert extracts the annotations & creates a txt doc

31. Goodreader Export Options

32. Goodreader extracts the annotations & creates a pdf file

Nostalgia

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you did something slightly different? How your life would turn out if you took a step in the opposite direction? or if you chose a different career path? or moved to a different city? or stayed in the same city? To me, the butterfly effect is such a mysterious and fascinating thing – one small change in your past could have a ripple effect that completely alters the course of your life.

I have often wondered if I had chosen a different preference for university where that would lead me – would I still be going back to university? or would I stick to it? What about if I didn’t go travelling to Europe the first time? Would that mean I would’ve enjoyed it more than what I experienced when I went back last year? Would I still kept in touch with my friends had we gone to the same university together? These question are always unanswered – I always draw up with a blank. It isn’t often that I regret the choices I make but sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I could have done things a little bit differently.

They say reminiscing about the past prevents you from moving forward into the future but sometimes you just can’t help it. I often wonder about these “what ifs”. Life is filled with so many uncertainties and questions – you cannot help it sometimes, but to think of all the steps that lead you exactly to this point in time, right this instant. Did you make the right choice? Are you making the right decisions? Is your life exactly how you imagined it to be? I am plagued by these questions frequently – like the giant pink elephant in the room, it is like a hazy fog lurking around in the back of my mind, and no matter how much I try to reach out of it to clear the air, I can never seem to accomplish the task.

Is it a mid life crisis? I’m not sure… not sure if 26 is classified as “mid-life” but I certainly have done a lot of reflecting over these last couple of years. Maybe I am just getting old. Maybe…oh nostalgia is such a dangerous thing. It can consume you if you are careful!

The No Free Lunch Principle

An interesting concept I ran across in economics is something called the “No Free Lunch Principle,” else known as the scarcity principle. It refers to the fact that although we have boundless needs and wants, we are all limited by the resources available to us. As a consequence of this scarcity, trade-offs are necessary – there is no such thing as a “free lunch”. Even lunches that are given to you for free, is actually incurring you a cost – the cost of another opportunity foregone – that is you could have spent that time doing something else or be somewhere else.

Time is something that falls into the limited resources category. An example they gave in class, which I thought was quite clever was the fact that if Bill Gates found a $100 note on the ground, would he bother to pick it up? As you know Mr Gates is the richest man in the world, and is apparently earning approximately $250 per second – so my guess is that it is not worth his time to pick it up – by the time he bends down, picks it up, he would have already made anywhere up to $1000. However, he, like the rest of us, is subjected to a ticking clock also – there is only 24 hours in a day.

This brought me to think about the whole scarcity issue…  I started playing around in my head with the “what if” questions to find any loopholes in this scarcity principle. And… I think I found one! As the no free lunch principle states that by doing something, you forgo the opportunity to do something else – so what happens when you are on the dole?! Firstly, you are receiving benefits from the government (no cost to you whatsoever, you are getting benefits for doing nothing. Opportunity cost foregone? Well…. not really when you didn’t want to find a job in the first place… you wanted to be a dole bludger remember?. You are limited by the amount of money you get though, but if your needs and wants are minimal, you shouldn’t have a problem!). Secondly, by receiving that payment, which is electronically deposited into your account so you don’t actually have to physically go to Centrelink to get it – it doesn’t waste your “time”. Lets say that you do actually have to go and physically get the money even… if you are on the dole, you really couldn’t be “busy” with your time to forego something else important ie no opportunity cost.

The only thing I couldn’t limit is the time factor – I have managed to block everything else… Now if we only had Justin Timberlake give us more hours in our life for survival then everything will be just dandy!

To all the other insomniacs out there

I, like everyone (I assume), love a good nights sleep yet here I am – is 1.35 in the morning and I am wide awake…blogging about not being able to fall asleep… Yep that makes total sense.

I currently have a thousand thoughts running through my head about today’s worries and tomorrow’s problems. It can wait – no it can’t – yes it can – no, it can’t… it has to be done now! This constant debate running through my head is enough to drive me mad. It’s a wonder I can think of little else. But believe me, these little trains of thoughts just come out of no where and nostalgia kicks in – one minute I am tossing up between going out to pay bills first or go staying at home and making phone calls then BAM I start to wonder how it came to this…

Life was SO much simpler as a child. I only had to worry about one thing – what food to eat when I were hungry. Now it’s split between my personal, professional, school and work life. Talk about multiple personality disorder. I sound like I need a Prozac don’t I? Maybe something stronger I think? Hmmm Zyprexa ought to do it…

As my mind is playing tug-a-wall with itself, trying to prioritise my next few days’ schedule, my body (especially between my shoulder blades) is screaming for some tlc.
“Why don’t you just go to bed and figure all this out tomorrow?” I can hear my body screaming at my grey matter, “I need rest too!”
“Because there are too many things to do tomorrow and not enough hours in a day!!”
“Who’s fault is that?” my conscience creeps in.
“Oh great. Not you-know-who…”
Now I feel the whole weight of the world on my shoulders. Every thought, insecurity, failure, issue, problem, and unanswered question starts rearing its ugly head.
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Why the hell did I drink two coffees today? And why did I go for a run so late at night?

The blame game starts all over again… Great now I’m getting a headache… And look, it’s 2am already… Looks like I won’t make it to the 8am gym session after all.
Where is that Prozac when I need it?! Eventually I close my eyes and wait for darkness to consume me…

First Glance at Windows 8

Windows 8 Preview Desktop

As you may or may not already know, Microsoft released a preview of Windows 8 a couple of weeks ago (you can find it here). I finished installing it last night (whole process took about 1-1.5 hrs to complete) and was playing around with it today. They’ve added a few new cool features but ultimately, it’s a bit disappointing… it’s not anything we haven’t already seen before. It did not have the WOW factor to blow me away with!

These are the things I’ve noticed with Win 8 Preview:

Start Screen replaces start button

1. Replaced the famous Start button with the Start/Home Menu

The interface looks nice but it is very awkward to use – You can find things you use regularly here – like your music, video, calendar etc here. There’s also Windows App store – which is very minimal at the moment. I think it is trying to imitate Android and Apple’s OS, so if you know how to use Android or iOS, then you shouldn’t have a problem with Win 8. Because Android and Apple both rely on a touch interface, horizontal scrolling is easier on those machines – you can flick left or right when you want to look at your apps etc. Here, you have to use the good ol’ mouse and keyboard to move across the screen (and if you are like me and installed it on your laptop, touch pad it is!) which can be quite impractical.

All Apps Screen

2. Apps Screen

Boy, did I have a hard time locating this button! I would’ve assumed on the start screen, it would have an “All Apps” button or something, turns out you have to right click on the start screen then select “All Apps” to see it. Again, nothing we haven’t seen before – exactly like the Android’s All Apps screen. Again, horizontal scrolling makes it awkward with the mouse, especially with my touchpad.

Microsoft App store & Side bar

3. Side Panel

One of the cooler things I did notice was the cool on the side app – you can keep an app running on the side (be it messaging, news, etc or in my case, wordpress!) to keep in touch/up to date with those on the internet.

Search "any time" function

4. Search any time function

This search function has made the “All Apps” screen a bit obsolete. Before I found the “all apps” button, I was using this feature – when you are in the start/home screen, you can start typing in the name of any file, document, app, setting you want, and it will search it automatically for you. It does a good job in locating the documents quickly, so they must’ve indexed the files pretty well to find it within seconds of searching. Pretty neat.

5. Other things

Win 8 still maintains the aero transparent windows edge from Win 7 but it has become borderless around the left, right and bottom sides. The edges are straight and sharp, no longer round and curvy. Pretty much everything about Win 8 is squarish and straight. All the app icons are square, straight and flat – unlike iOS where it’s rounded and bevelled. Although win 8 does seem to use up more ram than win 7 did - I haven’t noticed any lagging or memory leaks with my laptop.Everything still seems to function at a good pace.

Overall, Microsoft has done a major uplift with their Win 8 – I assume they are aiming to make it more touch and user friendly, so that later down the track, with the release of new phones or tablets running win 8, it will be a seamless process syncing files from one machine to the next (it’s just a guess, but that is what I would aim for if I was working for Microsoft).

I guess they are also trying to win back their share of the market Android and Apple have dominated over the last few years, but it appears they are a bit too late jumping on the bandwagon. Even their app store is abysmal – guess we will wait and see. Android was like that when it first started out – now the Android Market is phenomenal.

Personally, I don’t think Win 8 is worth the upgrade – it isn’t that spectacular. As I said previously, there was no WOW Factor when my machine booted up to these little quirky squared fishes blowing bubbles on the start up screen as it was loading the interface. It is still in its early builds yet, so who knows, the finished product may actually blow me away. Highly doubtful though.

Independent Reviews – Always!

After the number of hits I am getting on my blog (which shocked me out of my sleepy state this morning), I just want to say to all the other skeptics out there like me, that all my reviews are independently done. That is, all my apps, accessories etc are purchased from my own income and I only do reviews as a hobby. I believe everyone has the right to knowledge, and it should be free, and shared across the world.

I will always aim to provide reviews based on my facts and findings – but I cannot guarantee that it won’t be laced with my sarcasm or dry humour. Also, let me apologise first if you pick up on any spelling mistakes or incorrect grammar in my post – I am a massive grammar fanatic and a firm believer that if you do something, you should do it right/properly the first time, otherwise check, check, check!! (I am a pharmacist – we’re just wired that way.)

Which brings me to my last point – If you were redirected from PDF Expert’s website (Press Room page), you would have probably notice they made a mistake with my blog name – which kind of annoys me a little. You would think they checked their info before adding their referral to here, given what a massive corporation they are? I know I shouldn’t complain, since it is bringing viewers to here but nevertheless, carelessness is not something I am particularly fond of.

Anyway, breakfast time! Pearl Cafe today I think…

Until next time!

Panoramic Europe

Just wanted to share some of the amazing photos my sister took when we went to Europe last year! I was very impressed at the panoramic photos her little Sony camera was pushing out! Will add more photos when I have time!

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Famous Shopping centre in Dubai!

Dubai – Everything is so beautiful here!

Did a bike riding tour around Edam … lovely day to get away from Amsterdam!

Views of Rome from the top!

Down at the marinas in Dubai

Inside the Pantheon when we were in Rome

One of the famous locations in Prague! My second favourite city!

The beautiful Venice – my favourite city… sigh.