johnnyb, I expressly need to thank you again
, although I'm now lighter by €21.
I'm absolutely astounded by the quality of these Readdle apps. Their reactions are super-fast, they work super-smoothly. Amazingly clean, easy-to-understand user interface in all their apps.
I first tested a couple of freeware Readdle apps.
Terra is a browser that is very elementary, but still better than Safari. Again, lightning-fast reactions. Good for me as a tertiary iOS browser (behind my no. 1 favourite, Atomic Web Browser, and Dolphin).
The free
Documents app for the iPad is very nice in that it allows the integration of your Dropbox account, SugarSync account, etc. etc., in one place. Again, the speed with which it reads the cloud folders, is amazing!
It's rather embarrassing for the SugarSync folks that their own house-made SugarSync app is a
lot slower in reading SugarSync folders, compared to this third-party app, Documents by Readdle. I'll now be using Readdle's Documents to load my EPUB files from SugarSync into Marvin -- the SugarSync app is quite buggy in this regard, failing to pop up the "Open in..." menu for many or all EPUB files. The downside of Documents by Readdle is that it's not free on the iPhone -- it's called ReaddleDocs there, and costs €4.50, so I haven't bought it for the iPhone so far.
Now, as to
PDF Expert, I believe you are right. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have the winner here, in terms of the best PDF app on iOS! GoodReader is excellent, but no matter how I look at it, PDF Expert strikes me as even better. Much, much cleaner and better-looking interface (including the app icon!). Fantastic thumbnails feature. Amazing speed in loading even very large PDF files -- better speed than in GoodReader, I believe, and
miles better than the pitiful iBooks by Apple. Great annotation tools, great automatic synchronization with your cloud. It's an all-around winner!
The only downside is the pretty high price, for iOS standards: €9. And not only that -- you need to purchase the iPad and the iPhone version separately, so it amounts to €18 in total. I have so far only purchased PDF Expert for the iPad. But it's pretty clear that PDF Expert is the flagship app for Readdle, and based on what I've seen so far, they are totally justified in charging that much.
The
Scanner Pro app by Readdle is no less wonderful. Photographing books in it, and creating PDF files out of them, will be a breeze! Automatic Dropbox backup feature in real-time, as you make the photographs. Once again, minimalistic, squeaky-clean and easy-to-understand user interface. The price is €6, but if you buy this app, it can be used both on the iPad and the iPhone!
Finally,
Calendars by Readdle. All the quality self-evident in PDF Expert and Scanner Pro, applied to the calendaring functionality. Fantastic synchronization with Google calendars, preserving all the original colour-coding of calendar events from Google's desktop Calendars.
Apple's default iOS Calendar app is an abomination and an insult, and so is Google's mobile version of their Calendars. But here comes Readdle, and turns Google's calendars into
exactly what Apple and Google should have made them look like in the first place! The price here is €6 as well, and once again you only need to pay it once to get both the iPad and the iPhone version of the app.
johnnyb, many thanks for bringing these wonderful apps to my attention yesterday.