It’s a rollicking time for mobile office app users. In the earliest days of the iPad, just two years ago, little more than Pages was on the tablets to allow for document creation. Today there’s not only a way to create using familiar Microsoft tools, but a private cloud network built to ride inside of long-time vendor Quickoffice apps.

Quickoffice’s Connect is a new multi-device, cross-platform mobile productivity app+service that the vendor says “provides seamless document access, editing, saving and sharing experience across all devices and platforms, whether offline or online.” For example, a user with an iPad, an iPhone for personal use, and a Windows PC — as well as a Dropbox account — can leverage Connect for document needs.

Because the service operates from inside the newest Quickoffice HD app, it lets you search across mobile devices, computers, and multiple cloud storage depots for documents. Quickoffice says Connect provides “fluid mobile productivity and collaboration experience across platforms.”

This is an important advantage in the new, bountiful world of mobile document creation. Apple tried this with iWork.com, but recently cut off that beta service that could sync documents built on iPads with desktop workstations. It’s crazy to think that the omnipresent Microsoft Office will now run on iPads, using the brand-new free app CloudOn. But nobody knows how CloudOn is going to survive for free. Quickoffice has set up Connect with a way to pay — very important to surviving as a reliable document resource.

In mobile computing, Quickoffice says, “less is frequently more. It’s a snacker kind of experience, not a full meal.” You can drive Microsoft Office on an iPad, yes — but it doesn’t take long to realize how slowly that responds. And a lack of response time on a touch interface is pretty deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s not to like about something as simple as the Fujitsu Snap S1100? This is a compact device with a scan-a-page at a time slot and so little tweaking needed you can just treat it like a willing assistant which gets paper off your desk.

Document scanners will become essential once your business gets digitized. Your strategy might start with a steel fireproof filing cabinet for storing contracts, spec sheets, or articles yanked out of paper publications. The S1100 does this effortlessly for us. You just plug it into a powered USB port, install the low-maintenance software to control it, and then open the front door and scan. Once scanned, any document can be reproduced. No copier required, and you can reproduce in two-side duplex once you’ve got a PDF file.

It does a lot less good to have any scanner that takes up plenty of space on a desk. The ScanSnap S1100 is just 9 inches wide and 1.5 x 1.5 thick and tall. It tucks right under an iMac screen for storage. Its software does all you’ll need, adding pages one at a time for a complete PDF file, or creating a jpg of a photo you want to move from paper to digital. Set and forget, really.

We ran the software under Snow Leopard’s OS, so didn’t stumble through the few extra steps needed to operate it under Lion. TiDBits’ editors found a snarl or two, but so many businesses haven’t touched Lion yet. It works with Lion, if that OS is already plunked onto your Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

A Retina Display-caliber screen sharpens the new iPad

Apple introduced what it’s calling “the new iPad” (no number appended) at a media event today. The device arrives with the same 9.5-inch form factor and at the same price as its iPad 2 predecessor. There isn’t a great reason to upgrade from an iPad 2 if you’re looking over the features of today’s new iPad. Apple will be shipping the product on March 16, and orders began today. There are more models than ever now of the iPad, considering the wireless data and storage combinations.

The iPad 2 is a solid enough choice that Apple will continue to manufacture and sell it, but at prices that have now dropped $100. Frankly, this is the best news of greatest interest to business users who’ve eyed a tablet. The sharpest design for a tablet in the market now costs $100 less. That means $1,600 plus tax now gets you four iPad 2s instead of three. Apple has a useful comparison chart at its website for the newest and iPad 2 models.

The 4G capabilities of the new iPad aren’t going to make a difference to anyone but users in the two dozen cities where 4G is available. Verizon and ATT remain the only 4G providers for iPad connectivity. There’s a new 5-megapixel camera on the reverse of the new iPad, to give users the same ability to shoot HD video as the iPhone 4S. Beware: HD video and photos take up a lot more space than SD, and so storage for a new iPad probably ought to be added beyond the stock 8GB.

The new iPad starts at $499 for the base wi-fi model. It adds the ability to dictate text from its on-screen keyboard, but no ability to use the beta-status Siri assistant. It’s .03 of an inch thicker than the iPad 2, so some cases are not going to work with the newest model. It depends on how tight a fit your existing case offers.

We’ve worked with an iPad since it was first available in 2010. Today’s rollout with the A5X  chip and more internal memory is an upgrade that will only make obvious sense to a user who’s pumping work through complex apps: voice and handwriting recognition, or video editing, or GarageBand composing, or photo manipulation. The first iPad-ready version of iPhoto is also shipping today, as is iOS 5.1.

The New iPad launch has the feel of an event similar to the later launches of the Space Shuttle: remarkable compared to the technology that surrounds and preceded them. But still, an introduction that will raise far fewer pulses than iPad 2, or the original 2010 revelation.

I’ve spent more than a year looking for a full-featuring writing app for the iPad. The latest prospect is Notability. It syncs with Dropbox to let you import and then share any document you create or annotate, between the iPad and your laptop. (Very important; you don’t want the cheesy iTunes file-sharing as a default. Life’s too short.) Notability works with PDFs if you want to bring in a Word doc — although I’d be careful of the new Word-created PDFs. I’ve gotten a few that have disabled any edits, copying or pasting.

Notability has lots of pen sizes, and if you want to write really small, you can zoom in. Pretty good navigation abilities to make that possible. Plus it’s got an adjustable wrist rest area on the screen. It draws well; also has a separate figures mode, so you can insert something you’ve sketched into a PDF, for example. Or you can just freehand it, without using the gentle-polish features of the figures mode.

Yup, it takes some learning.

Selectable pen sizing on any iPad app, for drawing or note-taking — well, that’s an essential feature. Notability’s got sizes. As for a stylus, you may just need a better one. (And by better I do mean a bit more expensive.) Adonit was selling $29 models at the Macworld show, so I picked one up. It makes all the difference to have something with a very fine point, balanced upon a clear plastic disk the size of a thumbtack head that swivels. The trick is you can see what you’re writing.

I’ve owned an iPad for nearly two years now, and you can make it do lots of things that a laptop will do. It takes persistent research to find the right app (there’s an even better handwriting note-taking app just out from Readdle called Remarks.

But you need to have a real passion to pursue these solutions, because this tablet medium is so new.

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iPad keyboards have become a Holy Grail of mine. I keep looking for a keyboard that includes responsive keys (no rubber, please), a complete key layout where I expect them to be, easy Bluetooth connection, plus a lightweight integrated case that travels along with the iPad easily. If you’re in business and working remotely, writing for a blog or composing a lengthy email, you’ll want this kind of mobile accessory.

Cirago, a player who’s new to me in the Apple world, has a keyboard that seems to shine like the Grail. Its Aluminum Bluetooth Keyboard Case, which it calls the IPA 6000 on the company website, is an iPad accessory that made it possible to write most of this review (using the iWriter app). Cirago’s keyboard has real keys, with response and sound that might remind you of the set you’d see on an ultrabook. Nothing toy-like here, like the Kensington Folio keyboard’s whose rubbery keys remind me of an Easy Bake oven. Or the Zagg Solo, crafted mostly out of plastic and flimsy enough to be broken in transit on my order. (Still didn’t keep Zagg from charging $69 for it.)

Hooray! There’s real keys for the apostrophe and a genuine caps lock on the IPA 6000. Cirago’s designers also have wedged 17 function keys across the top of the main keyboard. The keys do expected things like adjust brightness, volume and bring up the software-based keyboard. Plus novel things, like select everything on the screen, cut or paste. The cursor keys have been integrated to allow you to select text without pulling your hands off the keypad by just holding the shift key as you move the cursors. One of the best ways to measure the superiority of an iPad keyboard is to watch how many times you must touch the screen to get something done. The number on the IPA 6000 was nearly zero.

The layout, for the reader here who writes fast, has a few right-hand-side problems. The right shift key is positioned next to the up-cursor, and that apostrophe key rests next to the Home key. In a standard keyboard, there’s a large shift key on the right, and the return key is next to that apostrophe.

Overall, within the limits that any portable keyboard presents, I could only find one slight ding: the Bluetooth sync button. It’s small and recessed just above the main keyboard, so I had to press hard to feel the responsive click that told me I’d sent a pair-up command. On the plus side, the keyboard falls to sleep to conserve battery.

In an improvement over the competing Zagg keyboard, Cirago has included a multiple-position plastic resting tab to balance your iPad or iPhone upon. It’s a small but thoughtful improvement that comes from buying a product in the second or third generation — like a “here’s how we do this better.” You can also use the Cirago keypad  on your lap or desk without the iPad or iPhone attached. If your iPad is nearby and paired with the keyboard, your mobile device will interact with it. Unlike the earliest of Apple iPad accessories, no docking is required. You will, however, need to get accustomed to the habits of typing on a compact keyboard — true of all products in this field. Read the rest of this entry »

James A. Martin of CIO.com reports that the market is now providing iPad access to cloud versions of apps that make up Microsoft’s Office suite of programs. That’s the genuine Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although your docs live on a remote server.

OnLive Desktop (free; iPad only) from OnLive, Inc., which offers full access to cloud-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your iPad.

There’s a serious cottage industry (a matured vendor group, to be fair) of suppliers who sell iPad apps to create documents for spreadsheets, presentations, and written docs. Apple itself has released Pages and Numbers apps, and each is careful to offer a Save As option into the Microsoft doc formats. This link-to-Microsoft move might be in advance of full iOS apps for each of its programs.

This changes the game for the smaller vendors such as ByteSquared (OfficeHD for iPad) Quickoffice with its apps of the same name, plus many others. BrainShark was selling a PowerPoint slide sharing app and service at the latest Macworld. Smaller companies always live in the shadow of a larger competitor entering their market. It seems to be happening in the Office world. Now the innovation and interface of these earlier entries is going to be crucial to keep them living in that world.

The makers of the PDF reader app Readdle showed a new app with a wider range of features at the recent Macworld. The new Remarks can do plenty of things — note-taking, free-hand drawing and PDF annotating. But what struck me the most was the perfection, it seemed, of the ability to rest your wrist on the iPad glass while you write or draw with a stylus. This is a tricky thing, I’ve learned during use of other apps. Somehow the Remarks app just sensed where I’d rest my rest while I toyed with the demo at the Readdle booth. No telling the app where you were writing, or having to stay inside a safe-zone area of the iPad with your wrist.

Denys Zhadanov of Readdle told me it wasn’t easy to solve the problem. But the company, whose tech staff is based in the Ukraine, has some other impressive chops to show in the market. Readdle built Terra, one of the best alternatives to the Safari app. Zhadanov said that Apple actually made Readdle slow down the speed of Terra when introducing new programming standards for iOS. I always found Terra to be a lot better Web experience.

Remarks takes a slice of ReaddleDocs’ powerful PDF annotation tools, includes a zoom mode plus a drawing engine. It offers pens and highlighters of different colors, floating text boxes, shapes and an eraser. We’re looking forward to testing the ability to annotate PDF documents that we’ll create from Word docs, printed to PDF files using the Mac’s inbred abilities. Zhadanov said an update to Remarks later this spring will let you pass your annotated documents into your Dropbox. Remarks is on sale at the Apple iTunes App Store.

Where do you want to go? You probably know, but do you know how to get there? The CoPilot Live app can help in ways that you’d need other apps to assist. A route that’s optimized for time. One that suggests places to eat or gas up along the way. An interface that lets you stay inside the app while you take advantage of Wikipedia place entries or Facebook Places. Even traffic updates, for just a little extra each month. Like under a buck.

But the thing that sets this nav app apart is that you’re not buying maps to use it. There are no in-app $49 purchases for North American roads. CoPilot is sold with maps included and free updates How’s that possible? Well for one thing, they do their own maps, instead of paying a third party. Then there’s the company background: they sell truck fleet software and have for 25 years. You don’t have to care about how CoPilot does its business but you’ll want them to keep up with those free maps. Nav apps can get expensive in several ways

But before we look at that, let’s do a discount dance. Until the end of this week the CoPilot app is $9.95, the iPad version $14.95. Discounts a-plenty here in Macworld week. Even at the regular prices this app looks like it can lead you to better value for nav.

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The noteworthy Macworld Expo unfurled its computing charms this week, but the 27-year-old show about all things Apple has a nouveau business patina these days. Almost 75 percent of Apple’s historic Q1 sales came off mobile products. It’s a remarkable tally considering that was a $46 billion first quarter. Apple is not doing it on the backs of consumers exclusively. Business has embraced the Apple brand, not only in mobile but also on the enterprise’s desktops.

Although it’s diminished from its heyday of crowding both North and South Moscone Center exhibit halls — the whole thing has been in the more cozy Moscone West for two years — Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark in attendance these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, even though it’s thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry — which if you take a moment to consider it, becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there’s a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I’m not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you’re making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.

This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience — Active Directory, that sort of thing — can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen at left is on a Macbook Air.)  After all, inside the heart of Apple’s products beats Unix, the original “open” system that’s supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn’t the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won’t be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.

Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I’ve worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple’s products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there’s cloud computing to take the place of vendor-specialized databases. For companies leaving the world of classic IT, this cloudy future is helping to make Apple’s business outlook brighter.

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On the Macworld upper deck the creators of Liquidspace have set up a quiet and unique workspace for editors and attendees here. It’s a demonstration of the power of the company’s iPhone and iPad app and database; the database tracks availability of more than 250 meeting places around the US. The space pictured is in Sacramento, and you can book it for a fee that Liquidspace collects via credit card. Some meeting spaces are fee-free, such as local libraries participating in the meeting space network.

Most small business providers have had a constant need for a meeting space away from the office. Especially when that business office is a home office. Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are the obvious options. These are, of course, poor places to Skype into a meeting, given the noise or the lack of privacy. if you’re on the road and away from a hotel, Liquidspace has a solution. But for $50 or more for the hour, if the budget allows, you can reserve a private space including amenities such as wifi, presentation gear, or even enough room to host a group of 15 colleagues or prospects.

The Liquidspace app is free and becoming a member lets you book spaces and get check in passports for exclusive use of a space — or just a $4 seat at a spot like the quiet workspace next to the Caltrain station in San Francisco. Of the 250 spots available now, 150 are in the Bay Area where Liquidspace is growing up.