Over at the Interchange Project, Patrick Thornton does a great job of breaking down his iPad setup:
When I first got the iPad, I purchased Pages, which is a pretty good word processing program in the abstract. It has a critical flaw, however: syncing a document between the iPad version and the Mac version of Pages takes a lot of work and is anything but intuitive or seamless. I would not recommend it, and it’s not worth describing the broken process here (a quick note: I would recommend purchasing Pages if you ever need to open and edit Word files, because Pages works really well for that).
Let’s just say that that Pages is nothing like the experience I get with Byword, where I start a file on one device, and it syncs automatically via Dropbox, allowing me to pick up where I left off on another device. All my changes are automatically synced via Dropbox, and I don’t have to do anything to get the latest version of a document.
A big part of what I do is write and take notes, and that part of my workflow will be the main focus of this post. I use several programs for this purpose: Omnioutliner, Byword and Simplenote (note: Simplenote is both an app and a Web service). They each serve a purpose, and I do not like programs like Word that try to be all things to all people.
Patrick goes on to provide a very detailed breakdown of how he has setup his iPad for writing (and other efforts) – passing along a number of great tips and tidbits on what he’s learned along the way.
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