Yes, I went early on a Saturday morning and waited in line and was thoroughly embarrassed by the Apple retail workers’ insane enthusiasm for the iPad. As soon as I exited the store with my $499 iPad, I got interviewed by @donpdonp and then went home and watched it on the iPad. So it was a surreal day to say the least.
First, lets get the iPad review out of the way. I love it, my girlfriend loves it, its super handy, the games are fun, iBooks are cool, loading pdfs on it is great, and I especially love the feature that lets you load files to individual app folders. This thing is going to get better and better now that some devs have their hands on it.
So, app reviews:
Goodreader is a multi-document-format reader for the iPhone/iPad, and it filled the main niche that I think alot of people were thinking when they got this thing. How can I put pdfs on it and read them comfortably? iBooks doesn’t have this functionality, and I suppose you could e-mail yourself a pdf and read it in the mail.app. But otherwise, you are stuck. Along comes Goodreader, which can handle a ton of formats, slog through giant pdfs with ease, and my favorite feature: reflow text. It can take the text from a pdf and reformat it for comfortable reading. Feature packed, easy to sync files with, and bug free! 5 out of 5 stars.
Feeddler was a breakout hit, mostly because it was a free RSS reader, worked well with google reader, and was out on day one. Now there is a pro version which supports offline viewing, which I may pick up because unfortunately, there is no caching of the feeds. When you click a new entry, it takes a while to load up the article. On that front it is pretty slow. But, its free! And I have yet to hit any bugs, but I did hit a weird bug in another app where I was trying to load a web view and my last Feeddler article was mysteriously being displayed. I will assume THAT is some sort of Apple bug. Also, the interface is pretty plain and boring, using totally stock UI elements. I give Feeddler a 5 out of 5, because its free. I don’t know if I’ll purchase the pro version though, as there is going to be a lot of choice of RSS readers in the near future.
