I know they’re out there, but I haven’t found one I like. I have a protective cover for the screen, but no sealed box for the whole iPad. Carrying this precious machine in my backpack along with hammers, chisels, water bottles and, eventually, bags of rocks seemed a bad idea. There is a behavioral barrier I’ve had to overcome before taking my iPad into the field itself. (Although I must say, I haven’t made any such notes worthy of leaving the device!) By the way, for sketching I very much like the Boxwave Stylus rather than relying on my fat fingers. As with Evernote, the results can be emailed from the iPad. It is great for outlining crazy ideas in six colors. I use Bamboo Paper for sketches in the field and with colleagues around the dinner table. I can, if I want, easily talk about an outcrop to my iPad and have it archive my precious words. I would not use this for serious writing (I can’t yet break free from the laptop for that), it is good for quick notes and, astonishingly, audio recordings and photographs through the iPad camera. I’ve found them most useful when traveling through (or flying over) a region I want to know more about.įor making typed notes indoors and out, I like the app Evernote because the typing is intuitive and it does a good job of correcting my mistakes. They are essentially GIS products for the iPad and iPod. Each comes with 25 layers, including bedrock geology, roads, mines, earthquake epicenters and much more. I have map programs for California, Utah and Ohio. My trusty MacBook Pro seems terribly primitive for reading now.Īlthough I haven’t used them on this trip, I want to mention the excellent geological map programs of Integrity Logic. (I seem to have more than a few now.) It has never been easier in a remote location to read documents and share them with students and colleagues. I add documents to this reader and others with Dropbox (recommended to me by Lisa Park), which has the advantage of syncing with all my other computers. I use PDFReader Pro so I can easily zoom in and out on the screen with the classic Apple two-finger move. Laptops are great for storing and displaying pdfs of papers and maps, but it just can’t beat the convenience of simple taps on the iPad screen to pull up astonishingly clear text and images. It is by far the most convenient field library I have ever had. This summer I have used it in Israel, Poland and Estonia and it has served me very well.ĭespite the dramatic photos here, I have used my iPad2 mostly indoors. KÄINA, ESTONIA–It is not yet one of my regular bits of field equipment, and I am certainly far from an expert with its use, but I can say a few things about the value of an iPad in geological fieldwork.
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