iOS App Reviews

At Meyer Library, we now loan out Apple iPad 2 tablets under the Equipment Checkout program. The iPads are currently preloaded with a number of multimedia and productivity apps. Our staff has tested and compared many of these apps and would like to share our findings. As much as possible, we tried to figure out how these apps could be most useful for a Stanford student.

Review Methodology

Whenever possible, we made it a point to play with the app without first reading through extensive help documentation, in order to see how intuitive the program was. After all, we guessed that most students borrowing the units would initially just try it before turning to help files. If we got stuck, then we'd resort to a quick search through the built-in help or Google.

We tried as many major functions as possible, especially those we could foresee that students or staff would likely use.

We noted quirks and buggy behavior, while acknowledging that there are many variables and it wasn't always easy to determine whether the issue was specific to the app or the particular iPad setup. Regardless, we could not recommend apps that didn't work properly for whatever reason under our testing scenarios.

As our testers used the iPad apps, we made notes on particular pros and cons to the apps we used. This was especially important in cases where we were comparing two similar paid apps with the intent to eventually install only one app for checkout. We also checked out online reviews to see whether our conclusions were consistent with those of other testers.

Note: If there is a particular app you are searching for in this article, it may be most efficient to use your browser's Search function to locate it on the page, as some apps have been lumped together with others for comparison.

PDF Annotation: Aji iAnnotate PDF vs. Goodreader PDF

Both of these PDF reading and markup apps had their strengths. iAnnotate's "Aji PDF Service" is a helper app that keeps files in sync between the iPad and your computer. It requires you to install the Service app on your computer. On the flip side, if you chose not to use the helper app, there was no simple way to keep your files in sync across multiple devices. Further, iAnnotate seemed to require that PDFs undergo an indexing procedure before you are able to annotate it with highlighting, etc. With very large PDFs, this process sometimes took a few minutes to complete, which is awkward if you need to get to work right away. As an alternative to the Aji PDF Service, it was also easy to direct PDF files viewed in the Dropbox app to open iAnnotate. However, it's necessary to go through some extra and unintuitive steps to get edited files back into Dropbox.

Goodreader PDF exhibited many strengths, including a built-in way to allow your computer to easily connect wirelessly to your iPad to add/remove PDFs from the iPad. We also noticed that Goodreader had a great interface for connecting with Dropbox, Sugarsync, MobileMe, Google Docs, Box.net, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, and POP3 and iMAP mail servers directly. Finally Goodreader did not require any indexing functions to be performed prior to annotating. Over time, we could imagine this saving the user quite a bit of time (and potential embarrassment).

Overall, both apps performed solidly, and we installed both on our iPads so you can give them a try. (The Stanford Med School currently uses iAnnotate PDF extensively.)

Notetaking: Penultimate vs. Noteshelf

One thing we expect many people to want to do is to take handwritten notes with the iPad. Most people seem to find this much easier to do with a stylus, but that's beyond the scope of this article. Penultimate is a very straightforward app that lets you write notes on various types of virtual stationary, including blank storyboarding sheets. You can even import your own images as custom paper templates. However, the limitations of penultimate were a bit puzzling, including the lack of a highlighter function, only having 6 pen colors/shades and 3 pen widths, lack of different notebook covers for easy visual recognition, and only one flat view of notebooks that cannot be organized. Finally, apart from stationary templates, there was no way to import other images into your notebooks.

Noteshelf, on the other hand, seemed to offer everything Penultimate had, and much more. In writing mode, you have highlighters and 17 pen colors/shades and 21 pen widths. You can import images and photos and select portions of a page to copy and paste. In finder view, you can rearrange notebood pages. In shelf mode, you have plenty of notebook cover options, and can group notebooks onto separate shelves, set certain notebooks to be Read Only to prevent accidental edits. To create custom sheet templates using your own background graphics, create a new notebook with the custom page template. Finally, the Dropbox and Evernote integration worked quite well in Noteshelf.

Ultimately, we felt Noteshelf was the more complete product and it is the one available on the checkout iPads. However, it still baffles us that there doesn't seem to be one self-contained app that allows you to annotate PDFs as well as take handwritten notes on the same page. Are we missing something?

Productivity: QuickOffice Pro HD vs. Apple iWork (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)

QuickOffice offered a clean and intuitive interface for opening many Microsoft Office files. Another advantage is that it allowed easy connections to a variety of cloud storage services for document retrieval. However, the limitations of QuickOffice started to surface quickly after that. To start, we discovered that it really is pretty limited if you need to edit documents beyond the most basic word processing functions. We could not edit images nor affect their layout in documents -- we could only delete images. In general, the layout controls were vary limited, offering no way to fine-tune margins and object placement. There was a pretty small selection of fonts. While we were impressed that it could open some Apple Pages and Keynote files at all, it is clear that you can expect some formatting problems in the translation (that you might not be able to fix in QuickOffice after import). Also keep in mind that the app can only edit PowerPoint 2003 and earlier files. At the time of our review, it apparently switches to Read-Only mode for files from PPT2007 and later.

It is clear that Apple really put in the effort to make the iWork apps shine on the iPad. In particular, if you need the most powerful word processor and page layout app for the iPad, look no further than Pages. It had considerably more features than the competing QuickOffice product, allowing you to select individual elements to adjust. Pages had a wealth of templates and shapes to use. And we were pleased to see that Pages could open, edit, and save files as Word documents. Some of the quirks to Pages included the "Hold Undo to Redo" function (why not just add a Redo button?), the complete lack of annotation functions like pen markup and highlighting. Finally, the thing that drove us most crazy was that there seemed no way to get files into Pages except through its internal folder system, iTunes, iDisk, or WebDAV. The lack of integration with Dropbox and Box.net were disappointing.

Apple Keynote for iPad could open some PowerPoint files, which was nice. However, we ran into some odd limitations, such as the inability to change the theme for a presentation once it has been set, and the lack of adequate zoom levels (say, for a very larger PowerPoint page). Apple Numbers had a cool way to quickly create basic forms and surveys, but we had a hard time using this app otherwise. When building charts, the color options for legends seemed extremely limited. We had a hard time building formulas for cells, especially with the limited screen real estate on the iPad for selecting ranges of cells. We couldn't figure out how to re-sort columns, and it looks like we can't save back out to the Excel XLS format. Finally, both Keynote and Numbers were restricted to accessing project files from their internal folder systems, iTunes, iDisk, and WebDAV. After seeing so many third-party apps connect seamlessly with other popular cloud services, this design decision seemed so limiting.

Music Generation: Apple GarageBand

The touchscreen makes music input fun and the preset chord progressions keep your original creations on-key so even if you have no musical background, it's hard to create something that sounds truly horrible. However, we felt it couldn't match the power of GarageBand for Macs. Even though you could physically "play" keyboard, guitar, and drums on the iPad surface, the flatness of the surface and lack of tactile feedback never quite felt right to our hands. Finally, we had a hard time figuring out how to cut and paste segments of music in the GarageBand iPad interface than expected.

Movie Editing: Apple iMovie

iMovie for iPad was fun to take for a spin, and might serve you adequate for a project that requires just trimming a clip or two and titling a video. Maybe we're too used to using the understandably beefier version of iMovie for the Mac, but the iPad version just didn't quite impress us beyond that. It felt slow and laggy at times, even when working with videos recorded using the iPad itself. The voiceover function is useful, but limited by the really weak built-in mic. The Auto-Ducking feature predictably but annoyingly adjusted the background track volume based on its detection of a "lead" track. (We never use the ducking feature on the Mac either.) Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be another, more granular control for volume. Finally, we were sad to see that the "themes" included with the app only apply to text titles. Overall, iMovie for iPad seems like a, "Hey, look what my iPad can do!" novelty app than a serious editor, but perhaps we've been spoiled by iMovie and Final Cut Pro for the Mac.

Secure Shell (SSH) Access: iSSH vs. Prompt

iSSH clearly offered more advanced features for power users, including a built-in VNC client. Prompt was more user-friendly for casual explorers, in our opinion, but did not include powerful conveniences like a VNC client. In the end, we decided to supply Prompt on all of our iPads during our pilot phase. 

Wireless Display Device: Air Display

This cool helper app allows you to extend your computer desktop through your iPad after installing a client app on your Mac. We installed this to see what creative uses students might discover for it. Some interesting uses for it that are common include using it purely as a secondary display (such as keeping a static document / window open on the side while doing the heavy work on your main computer, or using the iPad as a control surface for apps like Final Cut or Soundtrack Pro.

Videoconferencing: FaceTime vs. Fring vs. Oovoo

FaceTime is the built-in app for video chatting using the iPad. Like every other app listed in this section, it does require that the other user has FaceTime installed as well. We were indeed very impressed by the great video quality delivered through FaceTime over a wifi connection. However, you need to be aware that it only supports one-to-one conversations. Aside from this limitation, FaceTime is the de facto standard for video chat on the iPad.

The Fring service, on the other hand, does allow multi-user videoconferencing with acceptable video / audio quality. We liked how you can import your contacts from your Address Book, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo, and other services. This free app is worth trying if you want to experiment with video chat with more than one person at a time.

We also tried the Oovoo app, but unfortunately stopped using it after determining that the image quality was unacceptable for our purposes.

We want to hear from you!

Have you tried out one of our iPads? Please let know about your experience by filling out the iPad Usage Survey. (It's iPad-friendly, of course.) For other questions, comments, and recommendations, please write to multimedia@stanford.edu.