The other day I had a lunch meeting scheduled with a potential client. Part of the meeting was going to involve my take on a number of documents provided by the client. In preparing for the lunch, I knew that I wanted to be able to refer to a number of provisions throughout the documents as well as my notes. While flagging the relevant provisions and bringing the stack to lunch would have been doable, I decided to use the iPad.
To do this, I scanned the relevant documents and saved them into my Dropbox from my desktop computer. While I walked from my office to the elevator, I used GoodReader to pull the documents onto my iPad (no wifi at this restaurant). As we began our discussion, I opened my notes in GoodReader in portrait mode and locked the iPad’s screen orientation. The iPad sat on my right, no bigger than a pad of paper. I folded the Apple case back on itself and locked it in the angled position which put the screen at a perfect viewing angle.
As the client and I discussed the issues, I was able to quickly pull up the relevant documents. With the screen rotation locked, we were able to pass the iPad back and forth like a pad of paper without the iPad trying to reorient itself every second. I was able to jot a few notes by quickly flipping to Penultimate. Using my finger to scratch a quick note worked as well as a notepad in this case.
All in all, it worked well. I hadn’t marked my PDFs with bookmarks so it was a little cumbersome to refer to particular provisions in longer documents. I will do that next time. The presentation was well received by the client and the iPad kept things clean and organized. Next time I try this I may use iAnnotate to organize and present the documents. With the ability to open multiple files at once, view highlighting, create new notes on the fly and bookmark support, iAnnotate could be an excellent tool for the job.