It's App-ademic
September 18, 2013 4:43 PM Subscribe
I recently bought a Nexus 7 (I love it!) as a companion to academic work. I've primarily been using Google apps for communication and collaboration over Drive and Gmail, in addition to traditional tablet tasks like web browsing and social media. However I'm less than impressed with the bundled PDF reader, and would really like suggestions (first) about good .pdf reading software that allows for rich annotations in documents. Secondly, I'm interest in any productivity apps for Android tablets that others have used for academic / writing / office style work.
Specifically what I dislike about the bundled PDF reader solution is that it doesn't seem to allow annotations (or at least not easily). I also tried Google books, and the documents I tried to annotate didn't seem to work with it, and it's also a pain in the ass to have to upload documents to my Play account in order to view them. I'd like something that can read .pdfs directly from my downloads folder.
Specifically what I dislike about the bundled PDF reader solution is that it doesn't seem to allow annotations (or at least not easily). I also tried Google books, and the documents I tried to annotate didn't seem to work with it, and it's also a pain in the ass to have to upload documents to my Play account in order to view them. I'd like something that can read .pdfs directly from my downloads folder.
iAnnotate is free right now and it is what I use besides Notability for marking up papers. It syncs just fine with gdrive, dropbox and all the usual suspects. It is usually a $10 app for iOS.
posted by jadepearl at 5:17 PM on September 18, 2013
posted by jadepearl at 5:17 PM on September 18, 2013
I've beenn pretty impressed with the Mantano PDF reader for Android. For writing though... evernote.
posted by canine epigram at 10:33 PM on September 18, 2013
posted by canine epigram at 10:33 PM on September 18, 2013
i use repligo for pdfs and am pretty happy witth it. I have used attendance for roll-taking.
posted by Mngo at 2:17 AM on September 19, 2013
posted by Mngo at 2:17 AM on September 19, 2013
iAnnotate is free right now and it is what I use besides Notability for marking up papers. It syncs just fine with gdrive, dropbox and all the usual suspects. It is usually a $10 app for iOS.
We're talking Android here, not iOS.
I've have roughly the same situation as the original poster - an android tablet, like to use it more for academic work. Mantano's not bad and it fulfils the requirements.
I've found actually writing stuff on a tablet problematic. That is, there's no end of simple document processors (Evernote, Google Docs - although I've very wedded to the always online mode), but doing anything more complicated is difficult. Even the "office suites" available on Android and either underpowered or fiddly to use. Basically, you can use them to do rough notes or a first draft or look at a document. But you'll need to go to a desktop for the next step.
As for other academic software, I've found using Dropbox / SpiderOak etc. very useful for transferring files around and assessing commonly-used docs.
posted by outlier at 2:29 AM on September 19, 2013
We're talking Android here, not iOS.
I've have roughly the same situation as the original poster - an android tablet, like to use it more for academic work. Mantano's not bad and it fulfils the requirements.
I've found actually writing stuff on a tablet problematic. That is, there's no end of simple document processors (Evernote, Google Docs - although I've very wedded to the always online mode), but doing anything more complicated is difficult. Even the "office suites" available on Android and either underpowered or fiddly to use. Basically, you can use them to do rough notes or a first draft or look at a document. But you'll need to go to a desktop for the next step.
As for other academic software, I've found using Dropbox / SpiderOak etc. very useful for transferring files around and assessing commonly-used docs.
posted by outlier at 2:29 AM on September 19, 2013
Try ezPDF. I've used it extensively for annotating pdf when teaching from an Android tablet.
posted by JMOZ at 3:44 AM on September 19, 2013
posted by JMOZ at 3:44 AM on September 19, 2013
Seconding RepliGo. It's really fast, easy-to-use with all the necessary features and connects to Dropbox and Google Drive etc. in addition to reading the local harddisk. It's second to none especially if you want to "reflow" the text to get rid of the margins and resize the font to your liking.
posted by procrastinator at 4:22 PM on September 19, 2013
posted by procrastinator at 4:22 PM on September 19, 2013
I've used repligo and moon+ and I've settled on Moon+ mostly for quickness of rendering and reasonable UI.
posted by Dmenet at 12:22 PM on September 20, 2013
posted by Dmenet at 12:22 PM on September 20, 2013
Sorry for not being more clear. iAnnotate is FREE for Android and usually costs ~$10 for iOS. So that puts it back on the table, yes?
posted by jadepearl at 8:43 AM on September 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by jadepearl at 8:43 AM on September 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
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posted by vogon_poet at 4:46 PM on September 18, 2013