Just got mine, and wow, this is going to be great for genealogy research. The size of a thin book, the iPad can fit into any carry bag. It's easy to lose it in a pile of books on the table!
Couple it with a small 10 megapixel digital camera with macro and this is probably all you need for research at an archive, library, or town hall.
Believe it or not, but the touch keyboard in landscape mode is very easy to use and effective for taking notes. I've downloaded several apps from the App Store to help with this: Bento, Pages, Dropbox, Evernote, iDisk, Reunion (iPhone version only for now), and Office2 HD. The last app enables you to download, edit, create, and save .doc and .xls files using the cloud services supplied by Google, MobileMe, and Dropbox. In fact, I use Office2 HD as my primary writing tool on the iPad over the Apple Pages app because Pages cannot access the cloud. Pages stores its documents in a local folder accessible only to Pages on the iPad. If you want to use these docs in other places, you have to either email them as attachments or dock the iPad with your computer and sync them to your computer. I'm hoping Apple addresses this serious deficiency in the next release of Pages because the competition, namely Office2 HD, is way ahead of them right now.
Evernote has its own dedicated app for the iPad with limited functionality. You can create new notes and sync them back to all your other devices via WiFi or 3G. Dropbox also keeps your files in sync and allows you to download docs from the cloud to your iPad for local access.
I use Bento to maintain my source documentation and sync it between my iMac, Macbook, iPod Touch, and iPad. As I collect material, I create a source record in Bento for each referenced item. It is a fully searchable database that ensures I have all the proper information needed for creating full source references in my reports.
I've only begun to scratch the surface of what you can do with an iPad for genealogy. Future posts will dig into some of these products and methods.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment