Ever since I got my iPad in October last year, I've been meaning to write a review. And every time I've tried, I've given up, because I inevitably work up a lot of anger and annoyance at how Apple has taken what could have been an almost perfect product and turned it into something that sucks. Or at least, it sucks a lot more than it could have, if Apple, which used to be a nice company, hadn't been so extremely paranoid about controlling their users. To explain why I feel this way, I'll give a very brief recap of what I consider to be the most important part of the Unix philosophy:
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
-Doug McIlroy, inventor of pipes
As a PhD student, I keep a large collection of research papers in pdf format, and I want to able to read those same papers both at my laptop, and at my office computer. Thanks to Dropbox and Skim, I can do that very easily. Of course it doesn't have to be Dropbox and Skim, it could be any file-syncing program and any pdf reader, but the point is that each program does one thing, and does it well. Dropbox syncs my files, Skim displays my pdfs, and they can work together because they can access the same file system.
In my example with the pdfs, this means that my pdf reader (I use GoodReader) cannot just be a reader, it also needs to be able to obtain pdfs, as it can't simply access files downloaded by other programs. As it happens, GoodReader has been written to talk to Dropbox, but that doesn't improve the situation very much. You can import files from Dropbox into GoodReader, but you have to select and import them one by one, so you can hardly call it syncing. Those files are then copied over to GoodReader's part of the file system, which means that if I for example make some notes in a pdf, there is no easy way to sync those changes back to my computer.
Finally, let me point out that this is in no way meant as criticism of Dropbox or GoodReader, it's just an example of how Apple has crippled the iPad. I am aware that Dropbox comes with a pdf reader and that GoodReader comes with a sync feature, but Dropbox's pdf reader isn't as good as GoodReader, and GoodReader's sync feature isn't as automated and nice as Dropbox is on my Mac. And neither should they have to be, in fact there's no reason in the first place for a syncing app to include a pdf reader, or a pdf reader to include sync. Also, the illustrations in this article were created in Adobe Ideas and emailed to myself, as that is simply the easiest way of moving files off of an iPad.
-Tor Nordam