iPad 2 for Mad-ness

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Thwaite Flower 3

I really like my iPad 2. I bought it because I am always a sucker for the sales assistant saying “It’s the last one we have in stock”. And because I’d seen one. It is a very well realised device.The funky magnetic cover, whilst amazingly expensive (even by the standards of Amazon Kindle cases) does a very good job of providing a stand and protection, and the way you can turn the device off just by covering it is very neat.

I’m not keen on the way that you have to use iTunes to set it up and get things onto it, but I’m just about prepared to put up with this, even to the point of keeping a Mac lying around just to look after the iPads in our household. I reckon the secret of iTunes success is to run it on a Mac. My experiences with iTunes on the PC have never been good, and woe betide you if you ever try to remove iTunes from a PC. Actually, I do know how to do this, the first step is to reformat the PC and re-install Windows.

But I digress. If you do have an iPad there are a couple of programs that I’ve found very useful. The first is PDF Reader Pro which does a very good of rendering PDF files, which you can transfer to the iPad using the dread iTunes. Some time ago I bought Absolutely Mad, which is DVD filled with 50 years worth of Mad Magazine, all as scanned PDFs. The iPad is wonderful for reading this, so now I can carry around a few years worth of Mad for reading. I’ve just noticed that you can get National Lampoon on the same kind of thing, which is nice.

The second useful program is AVPlayerHD, which lets me carry around a few episodes of Veronica Mars wherever I go without having to fill up memory with large video files. This has very good presentation and lots of options you can use to make even highly compressed stuff look as presentable as possible.