@robopu said:
something that pisses me off about iOS is how locked down all user data is. by that i mean most user data is intimately tied to a give applictation. like ibooks for example. i copied my own private pdfs to it using another awful apple mess called itunes. now that my pdfs are in ibooks, i can't get them out to be used in other applications.. they're locked in to ibooks.
That's actually a function of iBooks being limited more than iOS.
iOS's security and sandboxing model is built on the idea that apps push data to other apps, rather than a pull approach. It's up to individual apps how far they wish to support sharing. As an example, Microsoft's Office suite goes out of its way to make for a hellish experience for users not wishing to use OneDrive. By contrast, TexTastic seems to talk to just about anything that understands text files.
iBooks is not really meant to be a PDF viewer, it just offers that as a stopgap because Apple for reasons I can't fathom, have never bothered to port Preview to iOS. This advice comes too late for you now, but get a better PDF viewer app.
- once it's somewhere else, will the permissions be ok for the other / new app to use the content without doing anything? or must i change them to stg else or am i just screwed?
Sharing is either by copy or by value, but in either case typically the receiver can go to town on the data. In the case of copying of course, the sender does not necessarily remain in sync.
and before y'all tell me to use icloud, dropbox, etc.. i've tried them out here and icloud plain sucks and is completely locked down.. you might be able to put apps under it's control but once the data is under an apps control it gets one folder and that's it.. nothing gets in or out and it's extremely hard to move somewhere else to share it. if you have access to a computer, you can then use it as an intermediary once you sync back to a computer and then copy out to somewhere else. but when you're a road warrior you're screwed without the computer.. i can believe how bad it is.
DropBox typically works well on iOS, as do the SanDisk Lightning Flash drives (iExtreme IIRC). iCloud is fine for some things, but again, the iCloud app is built with very much a document focus, and is pretty ugly if you need to deal with a bunch of files.
Long story short, unless you're using apps that fully adhere to the sharing features that came with iOS8 and 9 (which many of Apple's 1st party apps don't) iOS can seem pretty limited. Using the right apps, and most things are doable without much effort.
In the mean time, you'll probably need to manually move files from iBooks to a regular iCloud or DropBox folder, then go from there.
