One of my most used application on the iPad (which I will review later) is GoodReader. It allows us to import in documents of various formats from places like GoogleDoc, Dropbox, MobileMe and the Web for offline viewing. However lately I have notice whenever I try to import in a new document from GoogleDoc, it always ended giving me a 401 Error (Unauthorized) HTML file instead of the actual document. Older documents however have no problem importing into GoodReader. At first I thought the file was corrupted, so I created a few dummy documents and same pattern emerged. Next I tried various other applications that perform similar task such as Memeo Connect for iPad and lo and behold same issue crops up. Only older documents are able to sync into iPad while new documents gave the same error.

After digging through Google Reader, I managed to find the solution. The issue here is with the Google Doc’s new version which was launched April, 2010. Any documents created prior to the new version will have no problem with applications such as GoodReader and Memeo Connect. How do we solve this problem? Login to Google Doc and go to setting to turn off the “Create new document using the latest version”. See the image below for further details and voila everything will work as before. Hope this issue will be solve soon by both parties so we can used the new format with those iPad apps.