Apple Updates iBooks: PDF Display Suffers
I use Apple’s iBooks on my iPad for reading epub books, and since PDF support was added, I’ve tried it out a few times. But the $0.99 GoodReader has so many more features, that I haven’t found it very useful to use iBooks for PDFs.
Apple has updated iBooks, claiming that there were improvements to PDF support. I tried a few PDFs in iBooks, and if this is improvement, Apple has become experts at newspeak. When moving from one page to another in a few PDFs, it takes about two seconds for the program to correctly render a page. At first, the text is visible but blurry, then it slowly snaps into the right display after those two seconds. GoodReader doesn’t have this problem, most likely because it pre-caches the pages so the rendering doesn’t take place when a new page is displayed.
I never really expected iBooks to be an ideal PDF reader, and it has very few of the many features that make GoodReader my tool of choice for reading PDFs. But this “downgrade” to iBooks is disappointing.
Kirk, it may not be much comfort, but I noticed the same rendering delay in the original release of iBooks that supported PDFs (v. 1.1). The new version seems neither better nor worse than that version on my iPad.
Hmm, I don’t recall seeing that in the previous version. Maybe I’m wrong, because I only glanced at a few PDFs with iBooks. In any case, GoodReader is the best app for PDFs.
Just tried on my iPad and rendering seems fine. No delays even skipping between many pages.
The update seems to be a decent improvement over the previous version. I use the iLounge.com’s iPad Buyers guide as the standard as it has a lot of pages with a lot of images, and the previous version took a substantially long time between pages to render the screen and now it actually manages a passable job of performance. There is still room for improvement, but it’s much better as far as I can tell.
Well, Adam Engst over at TidBITS is seeing the same thing as me regarding page rendering…
This is a serious pain. I had no issues with the previous version then updated a couple of days ago and all my PDFs are permanently blurry. I haven’t tried Goodreader but may have to give it a go as right now ibooks for pdf (practically all my books are in this format) is useless.
Way to go Apple!!