Add PDFs to your iPad via iBooks

Regardlesss of the merits of the iPad HD display versus the e-ink screens favoured by Amazon, Sony et al, Apple’s Book store is growing in popularity and already shaping up to be as comprehensive and ubiquitous as the iTunes Store has become for music.

But one feature that I really like about the iBooks app is the ability to store PDF files. For professionals, this makes iBooks the perfect library for sales brochures, marketing material, training guides, manuals, catalogues and price lists – any kind of document, in fact, that can be saved and viewed in the universal PDF format. Although with iOS4, iBooks is now available on the iPhone, this method of document storage really comes into its own on the iPad. So here’s a quick overview of how you achieve this. … Continue Reading

Hint: Control Your Caps

One of the irritants of my first day iPad experience was trying to capitalise words using Shift Lock and the onscreen keyboard. Although there is a caps lock feature on the iPad, for some unknown reason, Apple has switched it off by default. To activate a more normal keyboard experience: … Continue Reading

Hint: Re-creating iTunes Library on your Mac when it “disappears”

Quick tip here for anyone who has recently confronted a blank, virginal iTunes Library screen instead of all their songs, videos and podcasts.

My iTunes is located on an external hard drive because it’s pretty large and I don’t like to have it eating into a chunk of my primary storage volume. Incidentally, I back this drive up once a week so I never lose (very much) data if the system crashes.

Every now and then, iTunes does something weird. I open it up and all my songs and playlists have disappeared. Even when I reset the directory that the drive is pointing to in the Preferences folder, it still won’t display the Library correctly.

Just like iPhoto’s multiple photo libraries, I have found the solution to this problem can simply be to hold down the Option key whilst opening iTunes in the Dock. A window appears asking me to create or choose a iTunes library. When I select Choose and navigate to my iTunes folder on the external HD, the main screen in iTunes re-populates itself instantly with all the correct information.

I have no idea why it sometimes does this but so far (touch wood) this simple alternative method of opening the app has always set things straight again afterwards.