iAnnotate PDF Review

For the iPad to be a true productivity device, it's got to be able to work with documents of all kinds. The iWork suite handles your standard text, slide, and spreadsheet documents, allowing for importing, editing, and exporting, but still only of a select number of file types. The iPad can view PDF documents with ease, but making any changes to them is impossible out of the box. iAnnotate PDF shakes things up by allowing you to do just that.

Highlighting, markup, strikeout, drawing, comments. Wouldn't it be nice to do to a PDF what you can do with a piece of paper? Any time we need to review a draft of a document, there are bound to be revisions needed. Or if we're reading something and need to make notes, having that ability to do so is imperative. Natively, there is no way to do this on the iPad short of taking a screenshot of the PDF and then importing it into a drawing program.

It's one thing to draw on top of a PDF; it's another thing entirely to integrate new elements into it. This is what makes iAnnotate PDF noteworthy. Changes that you make to the document are fully incorporated into the PDF, so that you can export it to anyone else for viewing, assuming they have a fully featured PDF viewer. For instance, your additions will not show up in the iPad's PDF viewer. Most programs like Adobe Acrobat or the Mac's Preview will display them just fine, though.

Importing your documents into iAnnotate is easy enough, and it provides a multitude of means to do so (e-mail, Safari, iTunes syncing, or other data transfer software). You can export them in mostly the same ways. When opening from e-mail, the iPad gives you the option to choose how you would like to open them, and iAnnotate PDF will be right there on the list.

Learning your way around the software will take some time, but there are helpful pop-up tips that explain every feature the first time you attempt to use it. Toolbars keep your various editing tools organized and easily accessible, but you can make them disappear if you need a full-screen view. They've also added the ability to scroll while you're editing by simply dragging with two fingers instead of one.

For a certain group of people, we can see this app being indispensable. It's currently the only app of its kind, so even if the interface isn't perfect, you'll learn your way around and be able to accomplish your editing goals. The results look great, thus giving the iPad yet another tool in its arsenal for being a one-stop device for the professional on the go.