iPad Experiment Day 2: I want my OneNote!

Day 2 with no laptop and just the iPad, and I’m left wanting. I have tried a few different notebook apps and I am not thrilled with any of them. The built in one is basic. EverNote looks promising but its blocked by our corporate firewall. ever note appears to be able to enter new notes with no access to the cloud, but viewing them requires a net connection. iDo Notepad seems better, but loses huge points because the UI assumes there will always be a virtual keyboard, so even when using my bluetooth keyboard and hiding the virtual one, I lose 40-50% of the usable screen space – it just leaves that area blank.

I did find one solution called MobileNoter, which has OneNote synchronization. It requires a local sync client running on your PC. I’m willing to be that it won’t work for me since I keep my OneNote notebooks in SkyDrive so they can be easily synced between my PCs. I’ll give it a shot though and see how it goes.

The other big issue is printing. the iPad can only print to AirPrint devices, which none of my printers support. So that’s out. Again, I found a solution that requires a Windows or Mac PC to be running a local agent that shares a local printer to AirSync. Unfortunately for me, I left the 90’s when 1999 ended and none of my printers are locally attached. They are all IP-based printers. Ouch. Other than buying a new printer (no gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent, not at this juncture), there seems to be no other way to print. Research on this will continue.