OfficeDrop has launched an Android app which lets you scan receipts, documents, or other text-based items with your phone and store them online. You can tag items or sort them into folders to make it easy to locate scanned documents later using your phone or using OfficeDrop’s web site. But the really cool thing is that OfficeDrop can also convert scanned documents into searchable PDF files.

The app also lets you upload files from your camera roll or from your SD card. OfficeDrop recognizes 25 different file types, although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the file browser for the upload menu, which appears to sort documents and folders randomly (or if there’s a pattern I didn’t see it).

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Adobe has released a new PDF creator for Android. Cleverly, it’s called CreatePDF. Get it? Because it.. creates PDF files…

Basically you can fire up the app on your phone or tablet to convert any document stored on your device to a PDF file. The app supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, RTF, WordPerfect, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign files as well as image files.

You can also share files from within the app.

CreatePDF is available from the Android Market and supports Android 2.1 and up. The app runs $9.99, which seems a bit steep until you realize that the web-based CreatePDF service requires a subscription payment of $9.99 per month.

via eBookNewser

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Adobe has rolled out an updated version of Adobe Reader for Google Android. Like the original version, Reader lets you open and view PDF files, it supports multitouch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, and it can reflow text to fit your display. But it also has a number of updates including:

• 

  Scan to download

  Support for tablets with larger displays

• Open password protected PDF files and PDF Portfolios
• Text search
• Go to Page

The app also now supports mor languages includign French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.

Adobe Reader 10 is available for Android 2.1 and up.

via Android Central

Appls has released minor software updates for the iPhone and iPad. The good news is that they fix a potentially dangerous exploit that allowed hackers to push code to your device through the web browser using corrupted PDF files. The bad news is that’s exactly how the Jailbreakme.com web-based tool for jailbreaking devices works.

In other words, if you upgrade your iPhone or iPod touch to iOS 4.0.2 or your iPad to version 3.2.2, you won’t be able to jailbreak your device by visiting Jailbreakme.com.

Of course, there are other ways to jailbreak an iOS device, but they tend to be a bit more complicated.

If you’ve already jailbroken your device, you might want to hold off on updating to iOS 4.0.2, as it will likely remove your jailbreak.

On the other hand, if you haven’t jailbroken your device and you’re concerned that someone else could use the same exploit to run malicious code on your phone, then you probably will want to update. For those of you that have already jailbroken your device but who want some level of security, you can check out PDF Loading Warner, an app which lets you know when the Safari web browser is about to load a PDF file so you won’t be caught unaware. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than nothing.

via TUAW

This week a new web-based jailbreak tool was released which allows you to jailbreak all sorts of iDevices just by visiting a web page and swiping your finger across a screen. It makes installing iPhone apps that haven’t been approved by Apple extraordinarily easy. But if you’ve been wondering just how a web site can install code on your system, here’s the dirty little secret: JailbreakMe uses an exploit — and other web sites could theoretically do the same thing for more nefarious purposes.

Basically, the developers behind JailbreakMe figured out a way to insert some funky code into a PDF file. When the mobile Safari web browser on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad attempts to open the PDF, it installs code on your mobile device. Kind of scary, no?

While it’s likely that Apple will release an update that prevents this kind of thing from working in the future, the company hasn’t issued any security updates yet. But there’s an unofficial app called PDF Loading Warner which will display a pop up message any time your device is going to open a PDF file. That way if you visit a web site without realizing that it wants to load a PDF, you can make an informed decision before clicking the load button.

The irony? PDF Loading Warner is only available for jailbroken devices. You can grab it from the Cydia store.

Update: Apple says it’s ready to patch the security hole, but hasn’t yet said when the update will be made available to the public.

via Download Squad

Ever need to print a PDF file, sign it, scan it, and then email it? I’ve lost count of the number of contracts and other documents I’ve had to do this for. Doc Sign is an iOS app that saves you a few steps, by letting you use your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to sign a PDF using your touchscreen display. No printer or scanner required.

You can use the app to open PDF attachments from the iOS Mail app, from Drop.io, or from a computer. When you’re done, you can either export the document or email it.

Doc Sign isn’t just for signatures though. You can also use it to fill out forms in PDF files. One thing that sets this app apart from other PDF signing apps is the fact that it doesn’t require an internet connection, because everything runs natively on your mobile device. That means your files will never be uploaded to the developers’ servers.

The app supports older iPhone and iPod touch models, but some features are reserved for iOS 4 and iTunes 9.2, including the ability to transfer documents from your desktop using iTunes file transfer and the ability to open Mail attachments directly into Doc Sign.

Doc Sign is available from the App Store for $3.99.

via ReadWriteWeb

With all the talk about Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR for Google Android, I almost didn’t notice that Adobe Reader for Android also launched last week. The PDF viewer is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Adobe Reader for Android supports multitouch gestures including pinch to zoom, double-tap to zoom, and flick-scrolling. There’s also a reflow mode that will wrap text in large documents to fit the size of your screen.

Scan to download

In order to run Adobe Reader for Android you’ll need Android 2.1 or newer and a phone with a 550MHz or faster processor and at least 256MB of RAM. Basically, the Motorola Droid/Milestone and Google Nexus One are currently supported, although some other phones may be able to handle the app.

It really seems silly that you need a brand-spanking-new phone in order to read PDF files, something that you’ve been able to do on Windows Mobile and Palm phones for the better part of a decade. But to be honest, the app even feels a bit sluggish on my Nexus One with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, especially when opening large documents.

One thing that seems very strange is that there’s no “open” dialog on the main page of Adobe Reader for Android. When you first launch the app you’re greeted with a screen that says “recent documents,” with no documents listed. In order to open a doc, I used a third party file browser to locate a PDF I had copied to my storage card, and clicked on it to open the document in Adobe Reader.

Once a document is open, you can hit the settings menu to bring up an “open” dialog — which takes you to the recent documents menu. If you haven’t previously opened a document manually, there’s no way to open a new document from Adobe Reader. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future release.

You can find a few more screenshots after the break.

via Kevin Tofel

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