Aji Annotate is the only PDF annotation app available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I don ‘t have to work with PDF documents very often “ but if I did I have to say Aji Annotate PDF looks like a unique and very effective app to use to handle these files. It touts itself as the first “ and only “ iPhone app that lets you make annotations on PDF docs, and I honestly cannot recall hearing of any others that offer this capability.
I ‘ve been giving the app a little test run for a few days now, and I ‘m very impressed.
If you need to work with PDFs a lot, this app really looks as if it has all the features you could ask for, and then some.
I ‘ve been using the app in tandem with its free desktop companion app, called Aji Reader Service (there are free versions for Mac and Windows) “ which can act as a ‘server ‘ of PDFs to the iPhone, and is also where you send your marked up PDFs to, to be able to maintain and view your annotations.
In the desktop app, you simply tell it where PDF documents are located on your PC in order for them to be available to download in the iPhone app. You can place them all in one location, or add multiple locations to the Aji Reader Service. Once you ‘ve added at least one location that contains PDFs, they ‘ll show up as downloadable in the iPhone app:
You can also just download a PDF from the web when you come across one “ and the app uses OS 3.0 ‘s copy&paste feature “ so you can just paste in a URL
Once you ‘ve downloaded some PDFs from the web or via the desktop companion app, you ‘ll see them listed in the app ‘s ‘Browse ‘ section
If you just need to read a PDF, you can use the app just like any other standard PDF viewer / reader program. It ‘s when you want to do more that things get interesting of course. You just tap once anywhere on the main page area to pull up an row of action buttons at the bottom of the screen
From that bar you can go back to the home area to choose another doc to work with or fetch other new docs; use the + button to call up the Annotations popup menu; hit the Bookmarks button to go to bookmarked pages and see a list of all the annotations you ‘ve added and jump to them if desired; use the Mail button to send the PDF using in-app email; se the Lock icon to toggle screen-locking on and off (lock it if you want to make sure it doesn ‘t flip its screen orientation when you don ‘t want it to); and hit the Search icon to search within the document.
Here ‘s what you see when you tap to pull up the Annotations menu:
From there, you just tap the selection that ‘s appropriate for how you want to mark up, or interact with the text. Add text notes wherever you like, or free-form finger notes and drawings
Add lines (which are auto-straightened for you), or highlight blocks of text
Make text underlined or strikethrough
It ‘s easy to jump back and forth to annotations you ‘ve made earlier, or to sections you ‘ve bookmarked
And you can edit your existing annotations easily as well
An important thing to note is that when you email a PDF from within the app it does not maintain your annotations. In order to preserve them, you need to upload the document to the desktop companion app “ which fortunately is very easy to do. As long as you have the Aji Reader Service open on your PC, you just tap the Upload button on the Browse screen next to a PDF ‘s name, and the annotated version is uploaded to the PC. (by default it is stored in the same main directory the original was located in and will use the original doc ‘s name with the word ‘annotated ‘ added onto it).
Once your doc is uploaded you can open it on the desktop and view all your annotations, in the Aji Reader app itself, or whichever default PDF reader you use.
I haven ‘t even covered all the features and abilities of the app here “ as I said, I ‘m not a heavy PDF user, so I just didn ‘t get round to testing out some of its abilities. Everything I tried worked well and as advertised though.
There are a number of good video demos showing off how Aji Annotate works “ you can give those a look HERE.
As I mentioned earlier, I ‘ve been very impressed with Aji Annotate. I feel like I want to work with more PDFs now, just so I can do some more highlighting and underlining and strikethoughing (throughstriking?) and such. It ‘s a very well-executed app and it makes you want to use it. It should also prove a popular one I imagine, as it offers some unique capabilities.
You can find Aji Annotate PDF in the App Store now, priced at $4.99.
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TAGS: iphone apps
