This is an important usability trick the devs should fix as soon as possible. Server files will be displayed inside a popover window, but I found weird that you can’t close the popover by tapping on another zone of the screen, you have to tap on a close button instead. The possibility to browse your entire Dropbox and download files to view on the iPad has turned out to be very useful: I’ve been able to view PDFs and screen recordings directly on the iPad, without the need to fire up my Macbook and leave the couch. As you can guess, the Dropbox option is neat as well, considering how popular this service among Windows and Mac users. Yes, mail servers: you can configure popular mail services like Gmail or your own IMAP or POP server to browse mail messages that contain attachments and save them into the app. The application supports a lot of servers and online services: Dropbox, Box.net, FilesAnywhere, FTP, WebDAV, MobileMe and mail servers. The last tab, Servers, is the most important feature of GoodReader. Too bad this is sometimes buggy and slow, but I guess perfection is just an update away. It’s very similar to what happens on Mac OS, as it can preview images, documents and videos: the video will start playing inside a thumbnail that you can even control with play / pause and a scrobber. The first one is the Preview tab, which gives you a graphical representation of the file selected on the left. There are 5 different tabs in this panel, each of them is very useful depending on what you want to do with a file. Indeed, GoodReader allows you to download files by simply specifying a URL, configure multiple servers and act on files much like you can on the desktop. But the left part isn’t as much interesting as the right one when it comes to “ do stuff”.

If you’re used to the list view of your Mac, then you’ll immediately understand how GoodReader works here. The left panel features a design very similar to Mac OS X’ one, there are folders allocated in a vertical list and the actual files are presented with the icon of their file type. The main window of the app consists of a split view (both in portrait and landscape mode, the app doesn’t use popovers in this way) that allows you to browse your files on the left and perform various actions on the right pane.

Good reader app for ipad