Michal Ždanský Readdle is a fairly established brand when it comes to productivity apps for iOS. They are responsible for great software tools such as Calendars, PDF Expert or Documents (formerly ReaddleDocs). It is the last-named file management application that has received another major update to version 5.0. It brought not only a new graphical environment that goes hand in hand with iOS 7, but also some other interesting features that make the application perhaps the best file manager for iOS.
New look
Documents has undergone several significant graphic changes during its existence, most recently last year. At the same time, each new form was significantly different from the previous one, as if the developers were still looking for their direction. However, the final UI design was successful. It is simple enough, clear enough, and at the same time the application has kept its face and has not turned into another white "vanilla" application.
Documents 5 sticks to the popular combination of a light background with dark controls. On the iPhone, there is a dark upper and lower bar, on the iPad it is the left panel following the status bar. The desktop has a light shade of gray on which the icons are aligned, either in a grid or as a list, according to your taste. If it is a text document or a photo, the application will display a preview instead of an icon.
Better file management
Readdle has taken care of file management and, to the delight of many, the application now supports full drag & drop. You can drag and drop files into and out of folders this way, or to the sidebar on the iPad and move an item to cloud storage or favorites in the same way.
Marking files as favorites is also another new feature, so you can easily filter only items marked with a star. To make matters worse, the authors also added the possibility of colored labels as we know them from OS X. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of filtering based on them, and they only serve as a visual distinction.
From the start, Documents supports a large amount of cloud storage and allows you to connect to network drives, but until now it was not possible to connect to shared folders in Windows. Thanks to the new SMB protocol support, you can finally move files between shared folders and applications.
Another significant innovation is background downloading. It was possible to download files from any services like Uloz.to through the integrated browser, however, due to iOS multitasking limitations, background downloads only took ten minutes after closing the app. Multitasking in iOS 7 no longer restricts downloads like this, and Documents can now download even large files in the background without having to reopen the app every ten minutes to keep the download from interrupting.
Plugins
Readdle has built quite a decent ecosystem of apps over its existence that are now trying to connect with each other, and Documents is at the center of that effort. They enable the installation of so-called plugins, which expand the application's capabilities with functions from other software offered by Readdle. However, plugins are an abstract concept in this case. These are not add-on modules. Buying a plugin in Documents means buying one of the supported apps from Readdle. Documents will recognize the presence of the application on the device and unlock certain functions.
Probably the most interesting is the "expansion" PDF Expert. Documents itself can annotate PDFs, but only to a limited extent (highlighting, underlining). By installing the PDF Expert application, additional functions will be unlocked and Documents will thus gain virtually the same PDF editing capabilities as that application. Adding notes, drawing, signatures, text editing, all without having to open PDF Expert at all. Instead of managing files in two applications, you will operate everything from only one. In addition, after activating the plugin, it is not necessary to have other applications still installed, so you can easily delete them afterwards so that they do not take up space, the new functions in Documents will remain.
In addition to editing PDF activations PDF Expert you can also export any documents (Word, images,…) as PDF with PDF Converter, print more efficiently with PrinterPro or scan paper documents or receipts Pro Scanner. Plugins are currently only available in the iPad version, the iPhone application will hopefully receive them in a future update.
záver
After a number of redesigns, Documents finally found a graphic form that goes hand in hand with the new iOS design language, and also kept its own face. Plugins are a very welcome feature that makes the application a very versatile piece of software that goes far beyond a single-purpose file manager.
Unlimited background downloads and support for the SMB protocol further push Documents to the ideal solution in this software category, and it is definitely one of the best all-in-one file managers for iOS on the App Store. What's more, it's completely free to download.
[app url=”https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/documents-5-by-readdle/id364901807?mt=8″]
Documents 5 has a lot of good features and that's why I would like to use them (for example, synchronization of the entire folder with cloud storage). There were also a couple of disadvantages, and quite big ones at that. When I go through files in dropbox, for example, it doesn't show me previews of the images. If I wanted to search for an image in the entire address book, I have to search one by one. And there is another problem. When I want to preview an image (file), it first copies the given file to the iOS device, which is very impractical. First of all, I don't want to copy it to the address book (I just want to look at it) and secondly, I want to move it to the given address book (for example, Downloads), so I have to go back to the Dropbox address book again. In addition, I still have to delete the copied file in Downloads. It is not only impractical, but almost unusable. I don't know how I would look at, for example, 30-50 pictures in one directory. In such a breakneck way?
Or am I setting something wrong, or am I doing something wrong?
This is exactly what I don't like either, and I'm starting to move towards the native BOX application. I use AirFile for copying between storage devices
Background download doesn't work for me. I don't know why, but it always cancels after about 3 minutes, so I have to check it every 2 minutes.
As a free application, I tried it a while ago and it was not bad. However, every time I started the application, I was offered other products. So, from my point of view, an application is not free if it annoys me with offers that I am not interested in. I now use GoodReader for file management.
The application is nice, but when you download a file, the Badge does not show that something is being downloaded.
That way you don't know if the download has finished or not.
Another thing is that Documents 5 does not support the AVI format and others.
If, for example, you play an MP3, the ID3 Tag will not appear on the Lock Screen. :-(
That's why I recommend the File Hub app, which supports all file types, including . AVI, etc.
https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/file-hub-usb+wifi+bluetooth+cloud/id520299954?mt=8