Filemaker 11 makes it easier than ever to take business data and create a snapshot of your information to help plan. It's also got dynamic links to auto-update such graphics

The canvas of the Filemaker database is wide and rich for Mac business users, an enduring data capture resource that looks even more vivid in the newest release of this tool. Filemaker 11 rolls out today with a big palette of charting and graphics shortcuts, the kind of built-in prowess that makes a great case for using the $299 solution instead of an Excel spreadsheet.

If it feels crude  to substitute a spreadsheet for a database, Filemaker’s Product Group Manager Rick Kalman says research shows otherwise. About 40 percent of the 15 million copies of Filemaker have been used by small business or small groups within larger companies. Already familar with Microsoft’s iconic spreadsheet, they press Excel into record-keeping of business inventory, sales or contacts. In doing so they limit the power of seeing their business portraits from every aspect.

The primary competition for us is Excel spreadsheets and paper, frankly,” Kalman said, “and that’s a pretty good target.” The features run well beyond the Excel hints and assistants that suggest you might be managing a list. And Filemaker 11 adds a feature that’s fast-becoming a Mac software standard: the Quick Search window in the top right of many programs, such as nearly every browser.

There's nothing like this in Excel, and the new Filemaker includes templates to go to work immediately with a professional-class database

Graphics stood out in the one-hour demo that Kalman led us through about a week ago. The wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple is among the best of Apple’s captive partners at creating tools ready for businesses, and the Filemaker 11 is ready to show off a company’s products, people in client databases or internal staff and contractors, even a new feature that interacts with Twitter to push in-progress photo updates for custom designs like guitars or Web sites or illustrations. But the concept of pictures extends beyond the fresh graphics tools in Filemaker 11. A new Snapshot link “flags a specific set of records at a point in time, preserving the same layout, view and sort order. Any changes made to the file are automatically updated in the database. This Snapshot Link file can be emailed to anyone who has FileMaker Pro 11 for easy collaboration.” That means that changes to you data can automatically be updated in a collegue or client’s office if they have Filemaker Pro 11 at hand. (more…)

Halfway into a million-file scan, it's another two-plus hours to a clean bill of health

You want your Mac security tools to behave like Columbo, or Inspector Plodder from the play Sleuth. Not the fastest of detectives, but one that will not miss a detail. So it goes with the newest VirusBarrier X6 anti-virus and firewall product from Intego. You can set it and go, but you might as well go far away at first. Its initial inspections will take awhile.

On our 2.83 GHz iMac with 4GB of memory, that was more than four hours to do a full scan of our 150 GB of occupied hard disk. Full scan is a choice that the VirusBarrier setup prods you toward once you complete the easy install. Too bad that it’s so easy to send the tool into such thorough paces. VB X6 skips over the “check my malware file for updates” stop, so you notice that your file is “35 days out of date” amid a lengthy scan. We’d lead a user into NetUpdate, the VB checker for updated files, before starting a scan. This is also an “install and force a restart” program, not among our favorites.

A complete scan can be a once-in-a-great-while event, however. VB X6 has got one-0ff scan options for fresh files, or scan the folder, or whatever you want to drag onto nifty interface. The inspector is thorough enough to try to catch malicious scripts, the latest ploy in penetrating you Mac’s defenses. We were glad to see attention paid to a very long list of intrusion techniques like this. Drive-by attacks come out of scripts. You have to hope the malware file gets freshened up plenty to believe VB gets the job done. There’s good reason to believe it’s about 30 days or so between updates. (more…)

Apple announced this morning that it’s long-awaited, thoroughly-dissected, hotly-contested iPad will be available for pre-orders in one week, with deliveries to begin April 3. The company will start with its WiFi models first, then add the 3G-capable units by the end of April.

Devices can be ordered online starting next week, or pre-ordered from Apple’s retail stores. Shipments start April 3 for online orders, with in-store pickups available the same day.

In a press release Apple’s Steve Jobs says the tablet, using a trademarked Multi-Touch interface, let users “connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

The device that will deliver a renovated Mail program (included) and runs $9.95 apps for Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet and the Pages word processor, does not yet include a camera. Analysts believe that Apple can sell as many as 5 million of the tablet computers in the product’s first year. Prices range from $499 for a 16GB WiFi up to $829 for a 64GB 3G+WiFi unit.

Some of the biggest enhancements to the business computing experience will come from Apple’s applications at first. The company promises a Mail experience that will let users “see and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox.”

The iPad’s Calendar tool takes a big step toward the functionality of the DayTimer and DayRunner journals of the 1990s. The landscape format and portability, along with the utility of managing several calendars at once, take the mobile device into the realm of portfolios we carried from meeting to meeting.

Apple’s refreshed a Web page that summarizes the initial value of investing in this business tool. The marketing copy focuses on the applications that will be available as included software.

It’s not tough to make a case today for better Mac security than what Apple delivers out of the box. Even though your business systems ship with a first-level firewall, they don’t arrive with any anti-virus software. Apple insists in clever ads that Mac security is not the problem that users find on PCs. That is true, but not because of the Mac’s superior designs. Unix, deep inside the system’s heart, is just as vulnerable as Windows. (Some say even more so; Unix security patches from HP for its business servers are a regular delivery.)

The Mac enjoys an easier time in security because Apple’s product is a less juicy target. Malware and viruses are designed to make money for criminals, and the number of PCs out there running bareback is 10 times the number of Macs. Security by obscurity only works until it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of time, sad to say, before the criminals fan out and try to rob your system of power or privacy or both.

Anti-virus software (AV) is not just the paranoid geek’s tool anymore. The last virus we detected came off a Web page, and we last had data corrupted in 1997. But things have changed since Apple moved to Unix underneath it’s OS. Oh, and there’s that thing called the Internet, plus the Flash videos you may use to gather research (like from the Wall Street Journal’s site, now that they’re owned by Fox.) Flash, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF files, are a big target for malware today.

You have more than one choice for a commercial AV tool for your systems (that wasn’t the case in ‘97). What you buy probably should provide both firewall and virus protection. Two leading companies offer very different value propositions in their AV software. MacScan commits to a fixed price, while another supplier uses a subscription fee+purchase price model. (more…)

Throughout March, the organizers of Macworld Expo 2010 are making the conference session presentations available to attendees. These are usually PowerPoint slide decks, and they are offered without audio commentary. But they are online this month at the Expo’s Web site, a real value for any attendee who couldn’t find enough time to sit in sessions and enjoy the riches of the show floor and keynotes.

The Web site is lightly protected, if you didn’t make it to the conference but had suspicions that the meeting would be as useful as ever. We wouldn’t want to encourage anybody to swipe anything, but the access is so simple that we think Macworld must be encouraging a little borrowing on the path to promoting 2011.

Some of these are basically billboards for the presenters, while others are standalone training. Rob Griffiths Best of OS X Hints has plenty of value by itself, but Griffiths has even posted a QuickTime file with his presentation (beware, it’s a 60MB download.)

But that it’s available at all proves that Macworld hasn’t lost too many steps from the glory days of Apple’s involvement. If you attended the show, have at the slide downloads for the next month. Grab ahold of a conference program to sort out who’s who from the bare bones download menus — and maybe queue up next year’s conference on your travel agenda.

We wanted to love the new Quicken Essentials for the Mac, truly we did. Bites of Apple and several other small businesses here are run on Intuit products, from the business-worthy QuickBooks 2010 to the pocket-sized Quicken 2005. There was never much reason here to upgrade to Quicken 2007 for Mac. By then, the Mac community was feeling well and truly overlooked by Intuit.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes. (more…)

Developers now have the iPad software development toolkit, so the behavior of the iPad interface is being shared via YouTube videos. Nobody can demonstrate the multitouch gestures yet — these simulations use a mouse to mimic the hand touch interface. If you’ve used the browser in the iPhone, there are few new wrinkles here. Best improvement is a keyboard closer to full-size. This might be the best use of the iPad’s keyboard that we’ve yet seen. (The link below is Flash, so again, apologies to the iPhone and iPod Touch users out there.)

In short, the iPad’s browser will be Safari and probably nothing else, since Apple wants to control this aspect of the iPad experience. But this Safari demo shows how the iPad can be a powerful research tool for gathering information from those Web business resources which don’t have a dedicated iPad app yet. The advantage to using this rather than a MacBook lies in the ability to share your results by just passing the iPad around — something cumbersome with a laptop, or even a netbook.

(Above video courtesy of appadvice.com.)

One of the busiest booths at last week’s Macworld 2010 Expo was one staffed by a 500-year-old company, showing a sparkling-new product. Papershow makes a presentation interactive over the Web or inside a meeting room. It relies on the magic of Papershow paper, a frame of microscopic points, almost invisible to the naked eye, which work as locators when a special pen moves across the sheet.

The software, pen and paper integrate with JPEG and PowerPoint files, so that slick slide deck you created to dazzle in the boardroom or in a pitch to a client gets a fresh angle. Canson, a French company that started selling paper in the 16th Century, unveiled the product for the Mac at the show, after selling Papershow during 2009 for the PC. It’s a $200 solution that was competing, sort of, with the likes of the massive $4,000 electronic whiteboard in the booth right next door.

The full solution includes a pen with a micro camera, Bluetooth transcorder and a processor on-board; the magic paper both in printable sheets (to put your slides in front of you to annotate) and in a notepad format; and a USB key of 256MB to plug into your Mac and receive the pen’s transmissions. Your presentation’s audience doesn’t even have to be in the room — if you’re able to share your screen over the Web, your marks and notes become part of your show in remote offices.

In front of a crowd still buzzing after a day and a half of expo time, Chason’s rep showed the ability to underline, circle or make a note on top of a PowerPoint slide, in multiple colors. The product makes a presentation more alive than the stock animations from PowerPoint. Once it imports a PowerPoint file for annotation, it can save the resulting markup back to PPT or JPEG formats, or Papershow’s native format.

Feeding a business demands information, the awareness that you find in articles and reports. This is a Mac experience at its best these days, using the Web, but the iPad can become a tool to make that task more mobile and more easily shared. It’s also richer, as Wired magazine shows in a video today. (Beware, that’s a Flash video below, so set your Mac’s processors on Stun. Sorry if you’re using an iPhone. You can see the video at the Wired site, too.)

We’ve got an ally in the enterprise reseller marketplace who sent us this video link with a simple note. This fellow, who talks with IT directors and enterprise managers about their future tech needs simply said after seeing the iPad in action, “Now I get it.” (more…)

Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was. (more…)