My wife wanted to do medical notes with an iPhone 3G. She purchased a wireless keyboard and found that it would not pair with IOS 4.2.1 due to an Apple bug. It would pair with IOS 4.1 but Apple will not let you go backwards.
She then purchased an iPad 2 and it would pair with the wireless keyboard. She planned to use the note pad application for taking medical notes during an interview. She planned to print the note she had just completed to a printer located in the interview room and then delete the note. The office stores all medical notes on paper. This will probably change when the current office manager dies or the government requires electronic filing.
In a past life she had done this on a Palm with a wireless keyboard and it worked just fine. She did have to sync her Palm with Palm Desktop on the local PC before she could print. The iPad 2 is a much different issue.
Just taking Notes was not all that big a deal but printing was another issue all together. Apple allows you to print to a small list of wireless printers directly. The two offices where she works do not have wireless printers so we needed another solution.
Print Magic seemed like a good solution. There is a small program that you load on the local PC and Print Magic connects to it and then you can print from the printers connected to the local PC. There is one issue. Print Magic removes carriage returns and line feeds from a text file so the text looses all its formatting. The only formatted output it will print is from a .pdf.
We then tried Print Central. It also has a small program that gets loaded on the PC called WePrint. The iPad2 finds WePrint and shows the printers connected to the PC.
Now the problem became, how do you get a file from a note taking application to the print application? This should be simple but if you are using a non wireless printer it is not.
The final solution was to open a word document outline, in a program called Quick Office and when completed, do a save as to a new file name. Quick Office has an internal file manager which allows you to save the file to one of a number of cloud storage locations. We chose Box.net as we already had an account there.
Print Central can print from Box.net as well as other cloud storage services so all she had to do was choose the file and say print.
My wife has a hard time understanding why her old Palm did this function so simply and the iPad requires all these extra steps.
Does anyone have a solution for this that does not use a Cloud service?
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