Dropbox really is an amazing computing and file sharing application. I was initially introduced to it when I needed to easily share files with various computers across the internet — and email was not an option.
Recently my wife asked me for another solution to viewing PDF files on her iPod Touch. She’d been using this process where you load the image into Stanza on a Desktop, then share it with the Touch. It works, but takes too many steps. Is klunky, she said.
Dropbox basics
On your desktop computer, when you install Dropbox, it creates a watched and shared Dropbox directory. Anything put into this directory is shared with your online Dropbox account.
Any other computer you install Dropbox on will immediately have access to your online Dropbox account, and have access to those files you saved on the other computer.
Dropbox has an app for that
For the iPhone and iPod Touch to access those files, you’ll need to install the free Dropbox app. Once you’ve set it up with your login credentials, viola! You have access to those same files you dropped into the shared directory on your desktop computer. Including media and document files.
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Thanks for that, I’ve been looking for a good way to read PDFs on my iPod Touch too and the apps I’ve tried didn’t quite cut it.
Happy to help David, the only gripe I have with pdfs on the iPhone or iPod Touch is that some of them don’t wrap or scale properly. Ah well, we can’t have everything now can we.
As an update to my previous comment, I’m now using dropbox to collaborate on a new project from both my desktop and iPod Touch – it is incredibly useful.
I also bought Quickoffice, which also allows you to open and edit Word and Exel files – not idea given the size of screen, but useful to have all the same.
David
Thanks for the article. Do you know of any applications that allow you to annotate pdf documents. I do a large amount of reading that requires commenting and highlighting. I’m thinking of an Ipad but I definitely need pdf annotation capability.
Thanks for the comment, and great question David. For me the iPod is too small to really edit PDFs, but an iPad would be a completely different story. So I did a quick search and found this company and app – http://jbrink.net/annotater/ – I’ve not tried it but from the writeup, it *looks* like you could work with this.
If you do try it, please feel free to let me know how it worked for you!
–Brad
Aji Annotater does not work with Dropbox, alas.
THANK YOU SOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!! (can’t put enough exclamation marks in there!
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