GoodReader (another great pastor app)

Instead of taking paper notes with me into the pulpit I now convert my material to PDF and open it in iBooks on my iPad. With some creative cover pages you can create a nice library of all of your sermon material through iBooks. The downside to iBooks is that there is no way to jot down those last few ideas in the margins that may come to mind on Saturday night or Sunday morning. A few weeks ago, I discovered GoodReader as a solution.

GoodReader is a PDF reader that allows you to make a wide variety of annotations to your document. You can freehand notes, highlight text, add callouts, or strike out marks. Anything you can do with a pen to a piece of paper, you can do to your PDF with GoodReader. Open your PDF in GoodReader, make your marks, save the new copy, and open it directly into iBooks.

GoodReader also provides a great file management interface that can interact with DropBox or MobileMe (or Mac Cloud, or whatever they call the thing now). Because of the file management capabilities, I also use GoodReader to organize all of the staff documents and reports that come to my office. The last three years I have compiled what I refer to as “the giant book of knowledge.” By the end of the year it is an oversized notebook with several hundred pages organized by month. Now I simply use Adobe’s PDF creation software, some folders on my MobileMe cloud drive and GoodReader to create forms and organize the returned reports. No longer do I have to haul the “giant book of knowledge” home or to offsite meetings, the whole thing is contained in GoodReader. Another added bonus is that I am saving a rainforest – go green Rev.!