Reading .PDF articles on iPhone

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:00:39 +0000

I promised to write some on the use of Apple’s iPhone in an academic setting. Now, I have found one that allows you to read .PDF articles when on the road, provided that they are uploaded to MobileMe. It’s a free application, and it will serve many reading-needs untill existing software such as BibDesk or Papers will incorporate iPhone utilities, which of course would be really nice. For now, we will have to rely on MobileFiles.

MobileFiles is freely available from the App store and coonects to your MobileMe account easily. Just enter your username and password, and that’s it. The interface is clean and initially shows your online iDisk, as well as files that are stored locally on your iPhone. Using a structure similar to the Finder, it is easy to find your files. Once found, you can store them on your iPhone, or open them directly, provided that the iPhone can read them. And yes, the iPhone can rezd .PDF files.

I use BibDesk to automatically store my articles, and I previously explained how to sync those with MobileMe. So, when I go the the folder in which I store my articles, I can easily read them, wherever I am. Sure, heavy reading on such a small screen is not very comfortable, but it does well when a quick reference is what you need. All the usual benefits of the iPhone interface are available: you can pinch to zoom in or out, when you rotate the device the article’s orientation also changes, and you can rotate single pages easily, again with the multitouch interface. Scrolling large articles can be a bit slow, especially concerning older articles which are basically scanned versions of the paper edition. The only thing missing is the ability to take notes. For that, I guess we’ll have to wait for the iPhone version of Skim.

Sync BibDesk papers to MobileMe iDisk

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:00:22 +0000

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your scolarly articles stored where you can always reach them for future reference? I’m sure you have them nicely organized on your computer or even laptop, but we don’t want to carry that around all the time, right? Many Apple-users may have selected to use Bibdesk to automagically store their articles, but that does not (yet?) provide any solution of syncing these articles with any kind of device. Fortunately, as part of the MobileMe service, Apple now provides the opportunity to store your BibDesk articles on the web, while retaining full-speed access to them when working on your own computer. Let’s see how to set it up …

The IDisk that comes with Apple’s MobileMe service is a 10Gb webspace (can be increased to 20Gb at the cost of mail storage space, or even more at the cost of more money) that automatically mounts as a web-disk on your desktop, is accessible through the internet, can be shared with others, and can be accessed from any other computer using either MacOSX or Windows (and I’m sure Linux as well) as a web-disk. Moreover, when working on a Mac of your own, the web-disk is automatically synced to a local drive, so you don’t have to rely on the speed of the web to have access to your files.

It is very easy to set this up in combination with BibDesk. Assuming you have Bibdesk installed and MobileMe working, just follow these steps:

Activate your MobileMe iDisk Sync. You’ll find this setting in the MobileMe preferences, under the iDisk tab
Go to BibDesk
Activate AutoFile if you haven’t alreadu (from the settings)
Do one of the following:

If you set up BibDesk to autofile your documents in a fixed location, change this location to a folder on your iDisk
If you set up BibDesk to autofile your documents in a location `relative to each document’, do nothing.

Move your BibDesk library to your references folder on your iDisk
In BibDesk: select all your references and then select from the the ‘Publication’ pull-down menu to ‘AutoFile Linked Files’.

That’s it, you’re done! Allways remember to make a backup of your files before you try this, but it is a rather simple and safe procedure. BibDesk will function as it always did, and as fast as it did because your iDisk is synced to your hard drive. Documents are now automatically synced to the web moments after you added them to BibDesk and available for future reference wherever you are.

Was this helpfull, and did it work for you as described? Please let me know in the comments below.

Rense Nieuwenhuis » .PDF

Reading .PDF articles on iPhone

Sync BibDesk papers to MobileMe iDisk