Hasta La Gadget!

Convert all your WordPerfect files to PDF with Adobe’s CreatePDF

Aside from the bloated carcass that is Photoshop, and the CPU-taxing nightmare that is Flash, Adobe is also known for the slimline, efficient and easy to use Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, applications for authoring and reading PDF files. Who am I kidding? Acrobat is pretty much the most complicated, slow and cumbersome way to do anything with a PDF, which is why I’m skeptical that Adobe’s CreatePDF for iOS will even work.

The $10 universal app takes files of many formats and converts them to a PDF. If this sounds familiar then that’s because we have recently seen two other apps which do the same and more, for less money: Print to PDF lets you convert anything to a PDF using the standard iOS print dialog, and also automatically catalogs web pages and emails. The other, PDF Converter, also ties in Dropbox support and converts several formats that Adobe’s app won’t, including Pages and Keynote files.

CreatePDF works through the “Open In…” dialog, letting you send documents ready to be processed. Once done, you can use the same method to get the PDFs out, or you can mail them. No Dropbox or other storage option is supported.

That said, you get proper PDFs from supported formats, including preservation of links in converted Word docs (PDF Converter loses these) and also support for Adobe’s own Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign file formats. Here’s the full list:

• MS Word (docx, doc), Excel(xlsx, xls), PowerPoint (pptx, ppt)
• Adobe Illustrator (ai), Photoshop (psd) and InDesign (indd)
• Images – JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF
• RTF, Text and WordPerfect
• OpenOffice and StarOffice documents

Maybe I’m being tough on Adobe for its desktop crimes — the mobile Apps, like the excellent Adobe Ideas, are way better and more focussed than what has come before. And until there’s one perfect PDF app that will convert all file formats, it looks like we’re stuck using a handful off apps. At least iOS has folders, I guess.

Adobe® CreatePDF [iTunes]

See Also:

• Hands-On with PDF Highlighter, the iPad's Best PDF App?
• PDF Converter for iPad, An Indispensable Tool
• Print to PDF, A Virtual Printer for Your iPhone, iPad

Samsung's bada 2.0 SDK will allow app developers to reach users with Samsung Apps, which have over 100 million downloads. Photo courtesy of Samsung.

Samsung has announced the release of their Software Development Kit for bada 2.0, Samsung’s own mobile platform. The operating system is expected to be released next month alongside three new Samsung Wave smartphones.

While most of North America isn’t familiar with Samsung’s proprietary OS, phones running already running a beta version of bada have a small market presence in Europe and Asia. In the second quarter of 2011, bada accounted for 1.9 percent of all smartphone operating systems in use worldwide, according to a study by Gartner. That still beats out Windows Phone 7 sales.

Bada 2.0 was first shown at the Mobile World Congress in February, featuring a slew of updated software including multi-tasking, access to an app store with about 40,000 applications, NFC support, and HTML5 and Flash functionality.

“Developers have an opportunity to reach a significant customer base with new, entertaining and compelling applications,” said JK Shin, president of Samsung’s mobile communications, in a statement.

The SDK is available for download from the bada developer website.

The Logitech Revue was the first set top box to launch with Google TV. With the newly released software tools, developers can now create Android apps for Google TV. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Google released a set of software tools on Monday that will allow developers to create Android applications for Google TV devices.

With the new tools, developers can test their existing mobile or tablet Android applications in a big-screen environment, eventually porting them over to run on Google TV. It’s also possible to create new Android applications made specifically for Google TV.

“With the add-on you can test your apps to determine if they would be a good fit for TV and whether any tweaks are required,” wrote Google TV product manager Ambarish Kenghe in a blog post.

Apps made specifically to interact with mobile and tablet interfaces, however, won’t run on the Google TV interface. For instance, if an application requires touchscreen interaction, a Google TV user won’t be able to find the app on the Android Market.

Google’s “smart TV” platform received much attention and critical praise after debuting it at the I/O developer conference last year. But after major networks began to block online versions of their content to Google TV set top boxes right around the time of Google TV’s launch, the product failed to catch on widely with consumers. So much so that Logitech, one of the largest manufacturers of Google TV set top boxes, reported “slightly negative” revenues for its Revue Google TV units, as product returns outpaced sales in the second quarter.

Still, Google has a chance to bolster the Google TV platform’s following by cross-breeding it with Android, a platform with a far stronger fan base.

Google TV devices will be Android compatible after an upcoming Android OS update to version 3.0 (Honeycomb).

Print to PDF adds a virtual printer to your iDevice. Screenshot Charlie Sorrel

Printing to PDF is one of the coolest unsung features of the Mac. Anytime you find yourself in a print dialog box, you can select a dropdown menu and turn whatever you were printing into a PDF file. It’s great for “printing” boarding passes ready to be mailed to your local print shop for actual transfer to paper, for example.

It’s a feature so fundamentally obvious that when the Lady was forced to use a Windows PC for work last week, she called to ask where to find it.

And now this feature comes to iOS. Print to PDF is an app that runs a virtual print server on your iPad or iPhone. Any time you choose to print, in any app that can send documents to AirPrint, you can instead pick Print to PDF as a destination.

Thanks to the limitations of iOS, the app can only run for a few minutes before being terminated, so you’ll have to launch it and then head back to the app you want to print from. Once there, you just pick the printer that has the same name as your iOS device and print. A dialog pops up to tell you it worked, and you can tap this to view the resulting PDF. All the PDFs can be organized into folders, and anything from the browser or e-mail client is automatically filed into a special folder.

That would be good enough, but there’s more. First, you can hit a button to turn the page of the PDF you are currently viewing into a plain text version, ready for copying and pasting.

You can also opt to have your iPad (or iPhone) to show up on your local network as a printer. Thus, you can print to it from any other iOS device, or even your Mac. It might work with a PC, too, but I haven’t tested that as my only PC is under a pile of dust beneath my bed.

There are other apps which let you create PDFs from webpages, but this one is so easy and versatile it might just become the default. It will also let you send the results to any other PDF compatible app, so you’ll never get locked in.

Print to PDF is available now as a universal app for just $4.

Print to PDF [iTunes]

See Also:

• Hands-On with PDF Highlighter, the iPad's Best PDF App?
• PDF Converter for iPad, An Indispensable Tool
• $100 iPad App Lets You Sign PDFs

After HP announced it would discontinue production of its TouchPad tablet last week, it looked like early HP tablet adopters spent $500 on a dud. If you’re an enterprising software hacker, however, there could be an opportunity to make your money back — and then some.

A hardware-modification web site is offering a $1,500 cash bounty for the first person to successfully port a full version of the Android operating system over to HP’s TouchPad.

Hacknmod.com offers a tiered bounty system for would-be TouchPad hackers: Just getting Android to run on the TouchPad without taking full advantage of the tablet’s hardware will win you a cool $450. But the more you’re able to integrate the system software into the device, the more cash you’ll earn. Get the Wi-Fi, multitouch capability, audio and camera up and running, and you’ll add another $1,050 to the pot.

While the bounty is characteristic of the Android-modding crowd which basically wants to slap Android onto anything with a circuit board and touch screen, it’s also an admirable effort to breathe new life into a dying piece of hardware. After reports of dismal sales and third-party retailers sitting on hundreds of thousands of unsold TouchPads, HP decided to kill production after a mere 49 days on the market.

It was bad news for current TouchPad owners. No more HP hardware gives little incentive for webOS app developers to continue producing applications for the platform. In turn, TouchPad owners miss out on the latest popular applications to come to mobile devices. And of course, it gives potential customers no incentive to buy the remaining TouchPads retailers have in stock, costing HP and retail stores hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone loses.

But if the porting plans work, it could mean bringing a slew of Android apps over to HP’s tablet. If the TouchPad can be made capable of running thousands of Android apps, the device may not be obsolete.

This isn’t the first time the Android-modification community tried to port the operating system over to non-Android devices. Android modders have run the operating system on Barnes And Noble’s Nook Color e-reader, certain Nokia smartphones and even an iPhone.

If you don’t want to go it alone, Android-modification-enthusiast site RootzWiki created a team specifically to work on porting Android over to the TouchPad, christened the TouchDroid team. The plan is to get Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread) up and running, then install a version of CyanogenMod, the most popular modification software available for Android devices. Eventually, the team wants to get Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) onto the TouchPad, Google’s tablet-optimized version of the software. The coders will post updates to a thread on a message board devoted to Android development on the TouchPad.

All of the Android hacking mania raises the question: If all you want is an Android tablet, why not just go out and buy one?

First, you may be able to get a TouchPad for even less than you would a proper Android tablet. HP, Best Buy and some U.K. retailers slashed prices on their TouchPad inventories over the weekend, dropping the price as low as $100. Sales skyrocketed, and the TouchPad reached the top of the electronics sales charts on Amazon.com. Android tablets that boast hardware similar to the TouchPad average $400 to $500.

Second, the future of webOS is unclear. HP says it will continue to support the operating system despite discontinuing its tablet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see tablet-optimized updates to webOS in the future. And of course, HP could sell off the operating system for its patents to a competitor like Google or Apple, which would all but secure the system’s demise.

Most important, hackers hack because they can. Android was built using open source software principles, a favorite of the modification community that codes for the fun of it. If you propose the challenge of running an operating system on a piece of foreign hardware, expect the DIY community to take you up on it.

If nothing else, do it for the money.