Lunch & Learn: Research and Writing on the iPad with Will Howarth

Will Howarth, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Eng­lish at Prince­ton, spoke to a large Lunch ‘n Learn audi­ence on Feb­ru­ary 16 about how he uses his iPad as an essen­tial com­pan­ion to read­ing, writ­ing, research and travel.

Howarth began the talk by describ­ing his long search for a light­weight, portable device that would be con­ve­nient for use while writ­ing and trav­el­ing. From small-format com­put­ers of var­i­ous vin­tages, to PDAs, Howarth has found the iPad to be the best solu­tion to date. Its light weight (24 ounces), long bat­tery life (approx­i­mately 10 hours), respon­sive­ness, and the avail­abil­ity of use­ful appli­ca­tions have made it one of his favorite tools for productivity.

Howarth showed the basic mechan­ics of nav­i­gat­ing sev­eral iPad screens, and using the screens to orga­nize appli­ca­tions by func­tion. He also demon­strated how to cus­tomize the per­sis­tent tool “dock” that appears on all screens, use­ful for stor­ing one’s most com­monly used applications.

Howarth’s pre­ferred lay­out is to have news and infor­ma­tion appli­ca­tions on the first screen of his device, writ­ing tools on the sec­ond, and on the third screen, a mis­cel­la­neous assort­ment of apps that are either not fully tested, or exiled as being of sec­ondary importance.

Cit­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of the vir­tual key­board on the iPad’s touch screen for some­one with larger hands, Howarth showed his solu­tions in the form of two Blue­tooth key­boards that can be synced to the device to allow typ­ing on a more con­ven­tional set of keys. One of the key­boards was inte­grated into a small car­ry­ing case. The other, more suited for desk­top use, was a com­pact stand-alone key­pad that allowed for typ­ing on full-sized keys. Another lim­i­ta­tion to the iPad is the lack of a USB or other data port that would allow for easy file trans­fer via portable stor­age media. How­ever, since sev­eral of the appli­ca­tions that Howarth cus­tom­ar­ily uses have mech­a­nisms to sync and share files among sev­eral machines, this short­com­ing has been largely over­come by appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers. Howarth pro­ceeded to describe and share his favorite iPad appli­ca­tions for writ­ing and research with his audience.

Howarth’s talk was divided into eight gen­eral cat­e­gories of iPad appli­ca­tions. Ref­er­ence tools, Data­base appli­ca­tions for stor­ing and orga­niz­ing, Read­ers for books and peri­od­i­cals, Note-taking tools, Note­books that sync files between appli­ca­tions, tools for work­ing with PDF files, Stor­age on Cloud servers, and a Pro­duc­tiv­ity suite with famil­iar office tools, formed the out­line of Howarth’s talk. Each of these cat­e­gories is dis­cussed sep­a­rately below.

Author’s note: Although the talk was cut short owing to time con­straints, Pro­fes­sor Howarth was kind enough to share his notes with me. This post con­tains mate­r­ial that may not have been pre­sented in the talk, or was men­tioned only briefly last Wednesday.

Ref­er­ence tools:

Safari

Safari (included with the iPad) is the browser included on all machines using the Apple iOS. Safari on mobile devices can be cus­tomized for fast brows­ing, for book­mark­ing pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tions, and cus­tomized to take advan­tage of the highly portable nature of the iPad. Howarth demon­strated how he has tai­lored his par­tic­u­lar Safari tool­bar so that he has research tools, par­tic­u­larly remote access to schol­arly research col­lec­tions includ­ing Princeton’s Library, avail­able at his fin­ger­tips. Among the head­ings in Howarth’s cus­tomized list of book­marks are Ref­er­ence tools, Authors, and Libraries.

Wikipan­ion

Wikipan­ion (free in the app store) is a tool designed to opti­mize search­ing, nav­i­ga­tion, and dis­play of entries in Wikipedia. The tool’s graph­i­cal dis­play of a Wikipedia entry includes a side­bar out­line of main head­ings in a Wikipedia entry to facil­i­tate nav­i­ga­tion and explo­ration, as well as con­tex­tual links to related topics.

Google Earth

Google Earth (free in the app store) is a portable ver­sion of the pop­u­lar desk­top appli­ca­tion, made even more stun­ning by the iPad’s high res­o­lu­tion screen. The appli­ca­tion includes all of the fea­tures and imagery of the desk­top ver­sion, with the added abil­ity to find your own loca­tion on the globe using the built-in GPS fea­tures of the iPad. A good com­pan­ion to travel, Google Earth, like Google Maps (included with the iPad) can help to find local land­marks, busi­nesses and cul­tural locations.

National Geo­graphic World Atlas

The National Geo­graphic World Atlas ($1.99 in the app store) is another appli­ca­tion for maps, this time fea­tur­ing high-resolution images of National Geographic’s own dis­tinc­tive car­tog­ra­phy. The app fea­tures 3 dif­fer­ent styles of maps, and can be zoomed down to the gran­u­lar­ity of a satel­lite image focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar street or build­ing. (Street-level maps are drawn from Bing satel­lite imagery.)

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

The Safari browser should be the first point of depar­ture as a source for ref­er­ence mate­ri­als, as the book­marks can be cus­tomized to point to many excel­lent online tools. Howarth rec­om­mends not buy­ing too many ref­er­ence apps until the poten­tial of Safari is exhausted.

Data­base Applications:

Things for iPad

Things for iPad ($19.99 in the app store), also avail­able in a desk­top ver­sion for Macs, is a task man­ager that fits with the cat­e­gory known as “todo” apps. The app allows you to enter notes, projects, and due dates, in an easy-to-use inter­face that syncs with the desk­top ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion. Since Howarth uses both ver­sions, he finds it easy to set up lists at home, and have them auto­mat­i­cally updated on the iPad. He uses the Cat­e­gories to set up pri­or­i­ties and to sched­ule tasks, and uses the built-in lists for “Today,” “Next,” “Sched­uled,” and “Some­day” to help keep him on track with deadlines.

DEVON­think To Go

DEVON­think To Go ($14.99 in the app store) is a com­pan­ion pro­gram to DEVON­think and DEVON­note, both desk­top appli­ca­tions for the Mac. The pro­gram can be used on its own, but accord­ing to the man­u­fac­turer “unfolds its full poten­tial ONLY when used in con­junc­tion with these appli­ca­tions. Howarth uses DEVON­think Pro Office and DEVON­note, and uses the appli­ca­tions together to save web clips, book­marks, files for courses, notes on alumni trips he has led, and writ­ing projects. A sync folder in the appli­ca­tions keeps the iPad ver­sion updated; con­versely any changes on the iPad are reflected in the desk­top ver­sions at the next synchronization.

Bento for iPad

Bento for iPad ($4.99 in the app store) is a per­sonal data­base pro­gram made by File­Maker Pro. It comes in a desk­top ver­sion as well, and can sync with Bento 3 for the Mac. The data­base includes tem­plates for many sorts of orga­ni­za­tional tasks, from to do lists, to events, to house­hold inven­to­ries, to expenses–even logs for diet and exer­cise. Howarth uses Bento at home on his com­puter, and uses the pro­gram mostly for list­ing addresses, book
inven­to­ries, lists of films. The appli­ca­tion, Howarth notes, can export and import spread­sheets in var­i­ous formats.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

These apps, Howarth noted, are best suited to those who are enthu­si­as­tic users of their desk­top counte parts. For those who don’t own, or intend to own the com­pan­ion pro­grams, sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity can be found in the Note-Taking appli­ca­tions, described below.

One major lack in this cat­e­gory of appli­ca­tions is one for orga­niz­ing bib­li­o­graphic ref­er­ences. Howarth told the audi­ence he has been in con­tact with the mak­ers of End­Note, a pop­u­lar bib­li­og­ra­phy pro­gram among schol­ars at Prince­ton. They report that an iPad ver­sion of their data­base is cur­rently in the works.

Read­ers:

Writ­ing begins with read­ing, accord­ing to Howarth–here are his favorite tools:

iBooks

iBooks (free in the app store) is Apple’s own e-book reader, with con­tent pur­chased from iTunes. iBooks also has the abil­ity to read PDF doc­u­ments, which can be included in the library from email attach­ments sent to the iPad. Items in one’s library can be viewed as book cov­ers on a vir­tual book­shelf, or in list view, and it is pos­si­ble to arrange col­lec­tions within one’s library. Howarth showed an 8-page PDF report writ­ten by one of his stu­dents that is now part of his iBooks library. The inter­face con­trols include adjust­ments for screen bright­ness, a search fea­ture, and book­marks. The inter­face also has an ani­mated page turn fea­ture, and a “scrub­bing” progress bar to slide rapidly from one sec­tion of the book to another. Books can be anno­tated, but PDFs can­not. Although iTunes sells many pop­u­lar cur­rent books, it also has many free offer­ings, mostly for books in the pub­lic domain.

Kin­dle

Kin­dle, (free in the app store) an app that share the name of Amazon’s pop­u­lar e-reader, allows Kin­dle books to be read on the iPad and the iPhone. There are numer­ous ver­sions of the Kin­dle reader, avail­able for most portable devices, desk­tops, and a web-based ver­sion. Con­tent for the app is pur­chased from Amazon.com, or uploaded by the user. The reader accepts .azw files, .mobi files, .rtf and text files, as well as PDFs. Howarth showed how to nav­i­gate his Kin­dle edi­tion of Deep Creek, a novel he co-authored with Anne Matthews under the pseu­do­nym Dana Hand. The Kin­dle inter­face turns pages with a swipe or a tap, and tap­ping on a word will simul­ta­ne­ously offer the options to high­light the word, make a note about the text, and , and to dis­play the entry for the word in a built-in dictionary,–with links to related entries on Wikipedia and Google. Notes book­marks and high­lights are stored on Ama­zon cloud servers, and can be ref­er­enced and printed through the online inter­face. The Ama­zon Kin­dle book­store has the most titles of any dig­i­tal book­store, includ­ing more than 25,000 free titles from Project Gutenberg.

Stanza

Stanza by Lex­cy­cle (free in the app store) is one of the first e-readers ever made, and has been recently acquired by Ama­zon. Less sophis­ti­cated than the other two read­ers men­tioned in this sec­tion, it offers anno­ta­tions, book­marks, search, and reverse black/white screen view. Stanza is backed by a library of more than 100,000 books, all of them free.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

Work­ing across e-readers can be prob­lem­atic owing to the fact that for­mats, cita­tions, anno­ta­tions, and page num­ber­ing are not stan­dard, which as Howarth notes, is a major headache for schol­ars. One bright note on this topic is the recent announce­ment that Ama­zon will include ref­er­ences to the pag­i­na­tion of the print edi­tion on which the Kin­dle edi­tion is based, which will allow more accu­rate cita­tions and place find­ing for read­ers who are using both paper and dig­i­tal edi­tions of books. Apple’s threat­ened restric­tions on books pur­chased from non-Apple apps also has caused some worry among consumers.

Among the three read­ers dis­cussed here, Howarth declares Kin­dle the win­ner, because it is the most afford­able and flex­i­ble plat­form for reading.

Note-Taking appli­ca­tions

These appli­ca­tions are ideal for tak­ing, shar­ing and synch­ing notes with other machines. In some cases, they can pro­vide an alter­na­tive for the Data­base appli­ca­tions listed above. There are hun­dreds of such apps avail­able for the iPad; here is Howarth’s selected list. Some of these appli­ca­tions have a browser inter­face that will update infor­ma­tion on your mobile device.

Index Card

Index Card ($4.99 in the app store) is a sim­ple non-linear writ­ing tool for the iPad. It allows notes to be cap­tured in an inter­face that resem­bles index cards pinned to a cork­board. Notes can be reordered, recol­ored, writ­ten, edited, and “stacked” into projects. Index Card exports a text file of your notes that can be read by most word proces­sors. Howarth finds this a favorite tool for brain­storm­ing, orga­niz­ing, cat­e­go­riz­ing by color, and for orga­niz­ing projects. He shares his cards via email, or using Drop­box.

Plain­Text

Plain­Text (free in the app store) is a sim­ple app for edit­ing text on the iPad. It looks much sim­pler than Index Card, and does many of the same things. Shar­ing and sync­ing is done via a Drop­box inter­face. Howarth and other writ­ers like it because it is sim­ple, ele­gant, and has a very “paper-like” interface.

Sim­pleNote

Sim­pleNote (free in the app store) is a note-taking app, that despite its name, is a lit­tle more com­plex than the other apps men­tioned in this sec­tion. Howarth uses Sim­pleNote in con­junc­tion with a Mac iOS appli­ca­tion called Nota­tional Velocity (a free, open-source down­load) that stores and retrieves notes. Howarth finds it a great way to type up quick or related ideas, which auto-sync to Sim­pleNote. There is also a browser appli­ca­tion for Sim­pleNote that can be used to share ideas with oth­ers. There is no choice of font, and the user inter­face is less attrac­tive than the other two options.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

All three of these note-taking appli­ca­tions have unique strengths, but of the three, Sim­pleNote is the most versatile.

Note­books

Note­book apps group items, sync them to cloud servers, allow for exports into var­i­ous word proces­sors, and allow entry of data either via a web browser or a desk­top application.

Spring­pad

Spring­pad (free in the app store) is an appli­ca­tion that allows you to save notes, tasks, links, images, nearby places, bar­code scans (from prod­ucts, books or media), lists of things (movies, books, wines) in vir­tual note­books that orga­nize your mate­ri­als by topic. It syncs via Springpadit.com to a browser inter­face that includes a web-clipping tool. Your note­books can be shared with fam­ily and friends using Face­book or Twit­ter. Howarth likes the appli­ca­tion for its orga­ni­za­tion and syn­chro­niza­tion, and notes that it is a very good tool for work­ing with groups. His note­books, con­tain­ing items related to Teach­ing, Writ­ing, Travel, and Local top­ics were dis­played against a back­ground of a favorite picture.

Evern
ote

Ever­note (free in the app store) is prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar note­book app for Apple devices. It stores many kinds of files includ­ing web­pages, PDFs, text, links, audio files and images, and orga­nizes them into note­books based on project type. Each media type can also be geo-referenced for map­ping and search­ing.  Ever­note syncs to Mac, PC, and web inter­faces, and the desk­top ver­sions are also a free down­load. The “todo” func­tions of Ever­note are quite good, and works best when used in con­junc­tion with one of the desk­top ver­sions (also free). Monthly uploads of up to 60MB per month are free on Ever­note; the pre­mium ver­sion ($45/annum) allows for monthly uploads of up to 1 GB. The pre­mium ver­sion also allows for read/ write note­book shar­ing with col­leagues, whereas the free ver­sion is read-only for those you share with.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

Howarth notes that other note­book appli­ca­tions allow writ­ing and draw­ing and speak­ing instead of typ­ing, but his rec­om­men­da­tion is Ever­note as the best note­book app.

PDF Tools

PDF doc­u­ments are part of the lin­gua franca of schol­arly doc­u­ments. There are sev­eral apps that allow PDFs to be read, anno­tated and shared on the iPad. Get­ting PDFs into your iPad can either be via a server, down­load, file-sharing via iTunes, or as an e-mail attachment

iAn­no­tate

iAn­no­tate ($9.99 in the app store) as the name sug­gests is a tool made for anno­tat­ing PDF doc­u­ments ( PDF read­ers are more numer­ous.) The tool allows high­lights, notes, free­hand draw­ing or writ­ing, book­marks, stamps, under­scor­ing, strike-through, and tabbed read­ing of mul­ti­ple doc­u­ments. The stan­dard tool­bars can be cus­tomized with a wide range of pos­si­ble com­mands, and the pro­gram allows dis­play through VGA out. Search is pos­si­ble at the doc­u­ment level, or full-library. Markups can be “flat­tened” for print­ing and shar­ing in a way that pre­serves anno­ta­tion as an image, or emailed “as is.” Sync is pos­si­ble through iTunes, Safari, email and Drop­box. The same com­pany makes a desk­top PDF com­pan­ion for iAn­no­tate calld Aji PDF Ser­vice. Using the desk­top pro­gram in con­junc­tion with iAn­no­tate makes it easy to man­age large libraries of PDF documents.

GoodReader

GoodReader ($2.99 in the app store) is another PDF reader/annotation tool. It allows sticky notes, high­light­ing, free­hand draw­ing and writ­ing, rub­ber stamps, under­lin­ing, strike-through, and shapes such as arrows, boxes, ovals, and oth­ers that can be used to draw atten­tion to sec­tions of a doc­u­ment. Trans­fer and sync can be done via MobileMe, iDisk, Google Docs, Drop­box, Sug­ar­Sync, box.net, and Web­DAV and FTP ser­vices. The appli­ca­tion is most ver­sa­tile in the doc­u­ment types it can read: not only PDF, but MS Office, iWork, HTML, image and audio and video files can be used with this application.

Papers for iPad

Papers for iPad ($14.99 in the app store) is mainly for schol­ars of sci­ence. Although the app is a PDF  markup tool, allow­ing high­light­ing and notes, and email­ing anno­ta­tions, the chief ben­e­fit of the app is the built-in search engine that allows you to find and down­load PDF arti­cles in the fol­low­ing data­bases: CM, NASA-ADS, arXiv, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, Pubmed, and Web of Sci­ence. There is a desk­top ver­sion for the Mac that can be used for syn­chro­niza­tion, but it also works with Drop­box, iDisk, iTunes and email. PDFs are stored on your iPad, so you need at least 100MB of free space. A lim­i­ta­tion in the cur­rent ver­sion is that although doc­u­ments are synced between the mobile and desk­top ver­sions of the app, your anno­ta­tions are not.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

GoodReader is a good value for most PDF use, and also works with other doc­u­ment types. iAn­no­tate has more markup fea­tures, and the advan­tage of VGA-out. Papers is invalu­able for a researcher who com­monly uses the schol­arly data­bases sup­ported by the application.

Stor­age on Cloud Servers

Get­ting doc­u­ments on and off the iPad, keep­ing them up to date, and shar­ing them with peo­ple, other appli­ca­tions, and devices relies mostly on wire­less forms of doc­u­ment trans­fer. Cloud servers per­form an impor­tant func­tion in achiev­ing this goal.

Drop­box

From the numer­ous times that Drop­box (free in the app store) is men­tioned in other entries, you may have con­cluded that it is a very pop­u­lar pro­gram for file shar­ing. Drop­box is avail­able for desk­top and mobile devices, has a built-in pub­lic html file for shar­ing, and a photo file for mak­ing auto­mated slide shows you can send to other peo­ple. Using any of the Drop­box inter­faces syncs to all oth­ers. The free ser­vice is up to 2 GB, and the next upgrade takes you to 50 GB for $99/ year.

MobileMe iDisk

MobileMe iDisk (app is free in the app store, but a MobileMe sub­scrip­tion is required) is a pop­u­lar Apple ser­vice that allows you to view and share files from a num­ber of devices. File types from iWork, Microsoft Office, PDFs, QuickTime movies, JPEGs and more, are sup­ported, how­ever files larger than 20MB may not be view­able on all devices. The iDisk has both pub­lic and pri­vate fold­ers to facil­i­tate shar­ing. Paid sub­scribers of MobileMe who have legacy iPhones can sub­scribe to a ser­vice on MobileMe that will find their lost or stolen iPhone.  Own­ers of the iPhone 4, iPad, or fourth gen­er­a­tion iPod touch with iOS 4.2 or higher can get this ser­vice with a free account, but stor­age space still costs money.

Air Shar­ing HD

Air Shar­ing ($0.99 in the app store) allows you to mount your iPhone, iPad or iPod­Touch as a wifi drive on your com­puter. It works with Mac, PC or Linux. Mount­ing your mobile device as a remote drive allows you to drag and drop files between devices for sync­ing and shar­ing. Doc­u­ments can be viewed and emailed. The app also allows you to mount other web-based servers such as MobileMe iDisk, Drop­box, Box.net, Web­DAV, FTP, FTPS, and SSH/SFTP, and allows down­loads of files from the web. Air Shar­ing can zip and unzip files, print to print­ers shared by Mac OS X 10.5 and above or Linux. It has an advanced image viewer for hi-res images, and an PDF viewer that sup­ports large, struc­tured PDF files. There’s a long list of view­able file types that includes most office appli­ca­tions and media files. The HD ver­sion is made espe­cially for the large dis­play of the iPad; the same com­pany also makes a fun app that allows you to turn your Apple device into an extra com­puter mon­i­tor.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

Drop­box is the Esperanto of file shar­ing apps, and you should have this one. Other cloud ser­vices can pro­vide extra features.

iWork

iWork for mobile devices started a rev­o­lu­tion­ary trend in office-type appli­ca­tions. Rather than buy­ing bun­dled soft­ware that includes a word proces­sor, a spread­sheet pro­gram, and a pre­sen­ta­tion pro­gram, as is typ­i­cal, Apple decided to mar­ket these appli­ca­tions sep­a­rately for the iPad. Each app costs $9.99. The unbun­dled desk­top ver­sion costs $19.99 each for the same three apps.

On the iPad, files can be shared using email, iWork.com, iTunes, MobileMe iDisk, or Web­DAV.. There is one-tap Air­Print avail­able on all three apps that allo
ws for auto­matic print­ing on any AirPrint-enabled printer.

Pages

Howarth describes Pages as his favorite word proces­sor, one he cus­tom­ar­ily uses on both the iPad and his Mac to share files with MS Word users. The iPad inter­face is described by Apple as “the most beau­ti­ful word proces­sor ever designed for a mobile device.” They may be right.

Keynote

Keynote is Apple’s ver­sion of Pow­er­Point, and in Howarth’s opin­ion, is in many ways bet­ter. Pre­sen­ta­tions are easy to build, and sync between devices (although fonts can be an issue). Keynote is one of the few Apple apps that works with the VGA-out fea­ture of the dock con­nec­tor on the iPad, which makes it pos­si­ble to use the iPad as a dis­play, as well as edit­ing, device for Keynote presentations.

Num­bers

Apple’s spread­sheet app, which Howarth says he uses mostly for grade sheets, and built-in for­mu­las to make cal­cu­la­tions easy. The app has many built in design fea­tures so that spread­sheets look less like bor­ing tables, and much more like a pol­ished publication.

Rec­om­men­da­tions:

These apps make the iPad a viable lap­top replace­ment. An exter­nal key­board is almost required to get the most out of them, but the appli­ca­tions cost so much less than expected, you can use the money you save  to get a fancy iPad case with an inte­grated key­board that makes typ­ing a breeze.

Con­clu­sion

Accord­ing to Howarth, the iPad is a lot more than enter­tain­ment — the con­stant evo­lu­tion of apps have made it into a valu­able tool for writ­ing and research. New, use­ful apps are emerg­ing every­day to extend the use­ful­ness of this device.

Howarth con­cluded his pre­sen­ta­tion with this video, which he said, makes it clear that research is “the coolest, sex­i­est work on the planet.”

The pod­cast for this talk is avail­able here.

The hand­out for this talk is avail­able here.