Apps of the Week: My iPad Reporter Tools

Few of you are reporters, but if you're a professional person or even just a diarist you likely use the iPad to record your thoughts and perhaps collect photographs, then desire to transfer these text and pictures to your desktop or the world.

So this week, I'll reveal some trade secrets – how I use three iPad apps to upload stories and photographic illustrations from the field to your browser.

iA Writer (Information Architects)

iPad is good at many things – word processing isn't one of them. Its keyboard offers a minimum of punctuation, requiring constant shifting to second and third keyboard screens, and no cursor control, requiring the lifting of your fingers from the keyboard to text to move the cursor to correct errors, frustrating the creative stream of consciousness.

Apple's own $9.99 Pages word processing app offers little help. While a lovely app for designing flashy documents, it's got the same crippled keyboard.

Enter iA Writer, priced at a startling no-brainer 99 cents (at least for the moment – the developer has been testing multiple price points; I bought it when it was $4.99, which is still a bargain). While lacking Pages' pretty templates, iA Writer excels at actual typing. As you can see from the photo, iA Writer gives you not only reportorially necessary punctuation such as M-dash, colon and semi-colon, quotes and parenthesis, but both character and word cursor control, which lets you keep your fingers on the keyboard composing without keyboard limiting distractions.

Like Pages, iA Writer automatically saves what you're working on – there's no chance of the app crashing and you losing your work – to the quite handy Dropbox app (more on this in a moment). Or, like Pages, you can email your document to yourself or to whomever it is intended.

My lone complaint is that iA Writer documents are unformatted text files. You'll have to cut-and-paste your document into a real word processor on your desktop PC, then re-save it as text to be able to open it back up from Dropbox.

Photogene (Omer Shoor)

Like iA Writer, Photogene ($1.99) is the best in its class, a photo editor that does more photo editing functions easier than most desktop photo editors. Every primary photo editing control is literally right at your fingertips: cropping, straightening, color and contrast corrections, red eye correction, resizing, and more.

I honestly can think of nothing Photogene misses or lacks from a get-it-done-and-out point of view. And don't worry about screwing something up – you can undo any change at any stage, even revert back to the original.

Almost as extensive as its editing capabilities is Photogene's list of exporting tools – from simply saving your fixed photo to the iPad's photo library to sending it out via Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, emailing it, printing it, FTP'ing it or Dropbox-ing it.

To import photos from your camera, though, you'll need Apple's $30 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which includes both a USB jack and an SD card slot. As soon as you connect either a turned-on camera or slip in the SD card, iPad immediately snaps into photo importation mode. Once you've imported the photos, you can then import them into Photogene.

Dropbox (Dropbox)

And, finally, like iA Writer and Photogene, Dropbox is the best app of its kind. It's the best way to share any file between iPad/iPhone and desktop, between desktop and laptop, between you and the world.

And it's free for up to 100 GB of storage. Why haven't you downloaded it?

You can download the appropriate app or software for whichever computer or device (there are versions for Android and BlackBerry as well as Windows, Mac and Linux) you want files shared on – iPad, desktop, laptop – which creates a folder. You then create a Dropbox account either on the Web site or via the app. You then simply drag and drop or "Save As…" files – photos, documents, videos, whatever – to this folder (or folders you create inside the Dropbox folder).

If your file originating Dropbox device is connected to the internet, your file is automatically uploaded and, in a couple of minutes (depending on the size of the files), is propagated to all the Dropbox folders on all your other internet-connected Dropbox-enabled devices.

Dropbox for iPhone is particularly handy since there's no way to otherwise transfer or share HD videos you shoot.

As noted, both iA Writer and Photogene offer Dropbox saving options, which means whatever prose, photos or videos you create are all easily accessible on any other device you use.

By using these three apps, I'm able to write and file stores and art quickly right from an event. And you'll be able to upload or share reports or whatever quickly and efficiently, making iPad more than an expensive leisure time filler.