Getting started with an iPad, advice please?

[wingsandsword]

My wife got me a bit of an early birthday present this year, she surprised me with a brand new iPad 2, 16 GB.

I'd been curious about getting one for a while, I liked a lot of things I thought I could do with it. Now I'm trying to fight the too-helpful software to get it to do the things I need it to do.

So, could I get some fellow ENWorlders here to tap the brain trust and help me figure out some things:

1. How can I select which songs I want to upload? iTunes takes every .mp3 and .wav file automatically and dumps them into a library and uploads them. Well, I don't want all my various sound effects .wav's and such on there, and I've got a lot of music I don't want on my iPad because I've only got 16 GB of space there and would rather pare down my 6 GB of music files to the 3 or 4 GB I listen to more regularly for portable use. I've tried to find how to delete the songs from the device directly, and am afraid if I tell iTunes to delete it from the library, it will delete it from the computer.

2. How can I upload .pdf's to the device to take them and read them? I've got several gigs of gaming books in .pdf I'd like to have as a portable library, not to mention lots and lots of work-related manuals that would be handy to pull out. Using my iPad as a .pdf reader was one of the main reasons I wanted one, and currently I can't figure out how to do this.

3. Can anybody recommend particularly good apps for gaming, especially for a 3.5e fan? Good dice rollers, ect. I saw that the website The Hypertext d20 SRD (v3.5 d20 System Reference Document) :: d20srd.org, which I go to regularly as a good SRD reference, has an app of the SRD, but it's $11.99, which is a lot for just taking a website of the SRD and making it an offline version.

 

[Welverin]

1. How can I select which songs I want to upload? iTunes takes every .mp3 and .wav file automatically and dumps them into a library and uploads them. Well, I don't want all my various sound effects .wav's and such on there, and I've got a lot of music I don't want on my iPad because I've only got 16 GB of space there and would rather pare down my 6 GB of music files to the 3 or 4 GB I listen to more regularly for portable use. I've tried to find how to delete the songs from the device directly, and am afraid if I tell iTunes to delete it from the library, it will delete it from the computer.

I don't have an iPad so I can't help with questions 2 & 3, but I can help with this one.

On the tab to the left that shows your library, playlists, and the iTunes store, will be your iPad when it's connected to your computer. Click on it so it's active.

In the main part of the screen you'll see it's properties and some tabs, select the Music tab on there you'll have a number of options for what iTunes will copy to your iPad. As you found out it defaults to everything. You can have it just copy playlists, selected playlists, items that are checked (the reason everything in your library has a check box).

You can do this for all of your videos, tv shows, games, apps, and podcasts (which can be set to be automatically deleted after you've listened to them).

And finally, every device you have is set different

 

[IronWolf]

For PDFs you want GoodReader. It isn't free, but it is worth every penny. It is well worth it. It has tabbed PDF viewing, annotation, highlighting, custom bookmarks, custom cropping and more. Excellent tool.

In addition it will let you copy your PDFs to the iPad via a couple of ways. You can connect via USB and sync as one option.

Another option is to make use of a Dropbox account. Put your PDFs in your Dropbox account and then GoodReader can download them from there directly without needing to connect via USB to your computer.

 

[Pilgrim]

1. How can I select which songs I want to upload? iTunes takes every .mp3 and .wav file automatically and dumps them into a library and uploads them. Well, I don't want all my various sound effects .wav's and such on there, and I've got a lot of music I don't want on my iPad because I've only got 16 GB of space there and would rather pare down my 6 GB of music files to the 3 or 4 GB I listen to more regularly for portable use. I've tried to find how to delete the songs from the device directly, and am afraid if I tell iTunes to delete it from the library, it will delete it from the computer.

• Open iTunes and connect the iPad.
• After it does it's thing, in the right hand column, left click your iPad (device name).
• In the right hand pane, it should be on Summary and at the bottom of that pane under OPTIONS, check the box that says "Manually manage music and videos"
• Then go to the top right of the screen and left click Edit from the bar.
• Go down the menu, click Preferences.
• Click the DEVICE tab, then check the box that says "Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically"

After you've done this you can go back down to your iPad device in the left column and go through your music and delete everything if it has already been uploaded through a sync. Either way, from now on it should not sync with your iPad automatically and you can drag and drop any song or group of songs from your library onto your device at your own leisure.

As for gaming, Goodreader has already been mentioned for PDFs and is definitely worth getting. I abhor electronic dice rollers, so I can't recommend one, but I know there are several out there, if you're interested in something like that. If you play D&D4E there are a couple apps that will allow you to upload/host character sheets and access them from your iPad, iplay4E, I think it's called.

Penultimate or any similar writing app is handy for jotting down quick notes with a stylus or finger if you don't feel much like typing. It's an app that lets you draw or write on blank paper/white board more or less.

To be honest, I really don't find much use for any apps for gaming at this time other than Goodreader, Penultimate and the Notes app that comes standard on the iPad. With just those three, I can pretty much play or run whatever I need.

 

[IronWolf]

Yeah - a notes app is nice to have as well. I tend to track hit points in it, make quick notes that I can put into a more organized document later, etc. I use Notes Plus for that and I did pick up a stylus for when I use it. Though you can write with your finger if you want.

I also have an Initiative tracker simply called initiative. It is pretty simple, works like one of the magnetic combat tracker boards would.

I have the free dice roller - Feudz Dice. I, like others, prefer to roll my own dice, but it seemed silly to not have a dice roller on there for special occasions. So that is the one I have installed.

I play Pathfinder so I have the Summoner app as well. Awesome tool if you play a summoner or GM a summoner on a regular basis.

I think those are my main tools for playing RPGs - GoodReader of course - but I mentioned that in an earlier post.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The built in iBooks is fine as a standard PDF reader, I'd try that out before splashing out on goodreader. You use iTunes to add PDFs to your iPad too. The UI is rubbish though. You add your first PDF by dragging one to the top set od icons in iTunes. When you drop it a new section called "books" will be created, to which you can drag other books. Then it all gets synced as normal.

I have found iPad2 to be an excellent reader for my gaming and technical books.

Cheers

 

[IronWolf]

The built in iBooks is fine as a standard PDF reader, I'd try that out before splashing out on goodreader. You use iTunes to add PDFs to your iPad too. The UI is rubbish though. You add your first PDF by dragging one to the top set od icons in iTunes. When you drop it a new section called "books" will be created, to which you can drag other books. Then it all gets synced as normal.

While you can read PDFs with iBooks, GoodReader brings a lot to the table - especially if you are running a game form your iPad. The ability to annotate and add notes to the PDF is awesome! When I was running Kingmaker I would make notes on various critters, highlight special abilities so I didn't forget to use them and lots of custom bookmarks to let me jump from one section to another very quickly (i.e. back to the map from the area description and such).

The tabbed access is also great as you can have a rulebook open in one tab and the module open in the other tab and switch back and forth quite quickly between PDFs.

I'm not sure if iBooks does pre-caching, but GoodReader does and it makes page turns of the graphic laden Paizo PDFs quite quick even on my generation 1 iPad

Coupled with getting rid of the need to connect the iPad to the computer to transfer PDFs is great as well. I can just make sure I have them in my Dropbox and even if I am at our gaming location and find myself without a book I can just download it on the fly.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Certainly some good sounding plus points there!