Simplify your electronic document process with digital signing, client tracking and lots more. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
In the age of digital and keeping distant, e-signing is the new normal. We have to send plenty of important and professional documents through the internet, so it helps to have more tools than just ‘send’ and ‘reply all’.
Readdle’s Wi-Fi Transfer gets our ‘stamp’ of approval. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
If you have an old Mac that doesn’t support AirDrop, or you use a PC with your iPhone or iPad, then getting files from one to the other is a real pain. Readdle’s Documents app fixes this, making it easy to beam anything from one place to the other, wirelessly. Today we’re going to see just how easy it is. And one other neat trick is that you can use this on any computer, not just your own.
If you use a lot of productivity apps on iOS, the chances are one of them was made by Readdle. The Ukrainian company has built some of the biggest and best software for getting things done, including Spark, Scanner Pro, and PDF Expert.
Readdle launched its first app in 2007, just a few months after the very first iPhone went on sale. Since then, it has built 40 products and assembled a team of 135 people in eight locations around the world.
This week, Readdle hit a major milestone: 100 million downloads. Here’s how it happened.
Documents offers mobile access to all your files, across your servers and cloud storage products. Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac
For the last few years, discussions about whether you can do “real work” on iOS have circled the internet. One of the most commonly cited issues with iOS was the lack of a file browser. In iOS 11, Apple gave us the Files app, but it suffers from some major limitations. Documents by Readdle takes the file management on iOS to the next level.
Zipping is so last century, but you can still do it easily enough on iOS. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Zipping files is easy on the Mac. You just right-click on one or more selected files in the Finder, then click Create Archive. The files get turned into an easy-to-handle .zip file.
On iOS, it’s a bit trickier. Even in iOS 11’s new Files app, you’ll find no built-in support for zipping files into a single package (or for unzipping them). To zip files in iOS, I use Readdle’s excellent Documents app. Lots of one-shot iOS apps will also do the job, but I like Documents because it’s also where all my documents live.
Scanning paper documents is easy in the iOS 11 Notes app. Photo: Cult of Mac
In iOS 11, the Notes app really wants to become the go-to place for you to dump all your ideas, all your snippets, and all your, uh, PDF scans. New in iOS 11 is the ability to scan a sheet of paper right there in the Notes app, then scrawl on it using the new PDF markup features built into Apple’s new mobile OS>
Potentially, the Notes app in iOS 11 will be able to replace apps like Evernote (aka “Everbloat”), as well as purpose-built scanning apps like Scanner Pro. Let’s see how to make a scan, and if the Notes app does enough to be your sole go-to notes destination.
Readdle just rolled out big updates that give users the ability to drag and drop content between its entire lineup of awesome productivity apps on iPad. It’s never been easier to multitask and manage your most important files on the go.
The company has also updated Documents 6 to turn it into a “Finder on iOS.”
We’ve been able to change the name of our Mac documents from the title bar since OS X Mountain Lion, and it’s made for an interesting new workflow.
In fact, there was a nice little drop down menu that would let you duplicate, move, and rename the document resulting from clicking on the triangle to the right of the document name in the title bar.
Readdle has updated its popular Printer Pro app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch to introduce a new user interface that better fits iOS 7, as well as a number of new features. The app now promises “desktop class printing options,” such as the ability to print multiple pages on a single sheet of paper.
The OS X Finder is an amazing thing, letting you create folder within folder, duplicate files, find your documents, and generally get stuff done. More and more, the Finder features are being integrated across all apps and documents on your Mac.
Case in point is the ability to find the directory path of a document from the document’s title bar, as well as being able to (since Mountain Lion, anyway) rename your documents in the title bar as well. All of this is thanks to the proxy icon, which Apple defines as: “An icon in the title bar of a document window that users can manipulate as if they were manipulating the corresponding file-system object.”