A longtime friend of mine set up camp today in the pro-Flash region, tagging the iPad as having a serious blind spot to the wonders of Adobe’s visual software. As the world knew in April, the iPad doesn’t support Flash. As it has learned after 3.2 million sales of the iPad in 90 days, users don’t seem to care.

An Apple content sales agenda — sell more movies! — was the only reason my pal could figure his girlfriend’s iPad was Flash-less. He was right about one thing: the iPad is a lot better at letting you consume information than producing it. It’s a weakness that might be firmed up in the second 100 days of the product’s life. When there’s about 7 million of them in the marketplace.

But Flash? It’s sort of a hot topic if you have to view it on Apple’s business products — or anybody else’s. Hot as in spin your fan, heat your laptop bottom, slow your user experience down. It’s not the content, it’s the compromise. That’s what drove Flash off iPhones and the iPad. Apple doesn’t want us to get burned by the power demands of Flash.

Want to view the future of a Web without Flash? It’s coming, and it’s arrived first on your iPad screen. (more…)

Even though it’s illegal to text and drive in 30 US states by now, people still want to capture their drive time for business productivity. A new iPhone app proposes a way to review email while driving — by having messages read to you over your iPhone.

Text’nDrive, sold for a hearty $19.95 for the iPhone, reads incoming emails aloud, according to its press release.

One thing that’s a little more difficult to do is check my email while I’m stuck in rush hour traffic on my way to work. And if you commute in California, I know you feel my pain. If you hate wasting that time like I do however, I highly recommend you take a look at Textn’Drive. This is an application that will read your emails out loud to you as they come in (Hands free ,I might add!) and let you reply. It’s a great way to stay safe on the road while staying caught up with work.

You may need advanced driving skills to be able to concentrate on traffic and your mail at the same time. The hands-free aspect of multitasking solves only part of the challenges in controlling a car at 60MPH while you review your correspondence. But if the prospect sounds enticing, you can cruise to the iTunes app store for more details and a chance to drive your communication longer and faster.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek has posted a report that chronicles the methods that businesses are using to adopt iPads. “Businesses including beauty salons and restaurants are experimenting with new tasks for Apple’s tablet computer,” reads the intro to a 650-word overview of how the three-month-old tablet is already taking hold.

“In a warehouse, your travel time to pick orders is 50 percent of an employee’s time,” says Tim Markley, president of Elkhart (Ind.)-based Markley Enterprise, a 75-person firm that designs marketing displays for stores and trade shows. “We put pedometers on our people and we actually saw steps decrease by 30 percent with the iPad,” he says.

The BusinessWeek site also has confirmation that much larger companies, such as Wells Fargo, are adopting Apple’s large-format business tool.

Organizers for next February’s Macworld 2011 have opened up free Exhibit Only registration on the show’s website. Full registration for the conference is also online, but Expo-only registration will be free through July 26. The show’s organizers are also offering attendees immediae discounts on selected products for the Mac and Apple mobile systems.

In addition to complimentary registration, we’re offering exclusive summer special pricing on Apple-related products for Macworld registrants only. We’ll offer one product special a day.

This event is the best way for a small business to research and evaluate new products, especially those that don’t have an ad budget or strong outreach to the business press. You can register at the website and learn a great deal just off the show floor, but adding sessions to your show package is well worth the extra $100 or so.

After creating the VPN Tracker client for Virtual Private Networks on the Mac, equinux has released what it calls an “over the air solutions for setting up iPhones and iPads in business.”

TARMAC is billed as the first professional provisioning tool tailored specifically for the Apple platform. Medium to large enterprises can use it to securely set up and manage their iPhones and iPads over-the-air.

“TARMAC is a milestone for the use of the iPhone and iPad in businesses,”said equinux CEO Till Schadde. “We’ve tailored TARMAC specifically to [Apple's iOS mobile] platform rather than for a myriad of other devices. TARMAC is the only dedicated solution for the iPhone and iPad, making no technical compromises.”

Businesses can use TARMAC to remotely set up their iPhones and iPads without needing to manually connect them to a machine. TARMAC Server operates within a company’s network and using an existing directory service to automatically create personalized user profiles. (more…)

Quickoffice has taken its mobile office productivity suite to the iPad with a $14.99 release. The Quickoffice Connect Mobile suite software provides a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool, all connected to Web-based storage sharing services such as MobileMe, Dropbox, Google Docs or Box.net. This connection aspect gets around one of the iPad’s weakest features — its ability to transfer documents.

As a portable office, the iPhone/Touch version of these apps were a marvel, but something only the most stranded of business users would rely upon. The software’s reach just didn’t fit in the tiny iPhone screen. If you were stubborn enough, you could use the spreadsheet for taking down figures.

On the iPad’s spacious geography, the software opens up and gives you a great alternative to $30 worth of Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the iPad. Everything that Quickoffice creates can be used in Microsoft’s Office applications on the Mac. (more…)

Absolute Software has announced that it will provide what it calls “enterprise-caliber” management software for the new iOS 4 Apple devices such as the iPhone. The company, which sells a solution for business computer asset management called Absolute Manage, will move core components of that software to the new Apple mobile OS.

Although the iPhone was roundly hooted at when Apple introduced its first enterprise features — such as the ability to handle Microsoft Exchange mail on the iPhone’s Mail client — the phones have become a staple of business users around the world. IT managers have learned they can’t keep iPhones out of company networks, so they’re resigned to admitting them and are now employing them as IT tools.

Absolute Manage has a single feature that can sell it to any company using Apple’s mobile products. An administrator can wipe a computer or phone’s data off the device if it’s been stolen or lost. iOS 4 devices (which could be any 4G or 3GS phone) can also be locked with a remote command in an emergency, or have their passcode cleared for data protection. (more…)

Apple has pushed out an update to the Snow Leopard version of the OS that adds new security guards against malware. It’s the first release in 10 months that improves this sort of hacker barrier.

If only the new iPad could be so lucky to be so well protected. We’ve been using the tablet since its release, but nary an update is to be downloaded to advance the device’s security.

The 10.6.4 version of Snow Leopard, which is a 17-minute download on a middle-fast DSL line, introduces new protection to prevent back door attacks on Macs through the iPhoto software that ships with every system. A new feature called XProtect gets an update that keeps hackers from installing malware by fooling users into thinking iPhoto is at work, when damage is being done.

An update of a Mac’s operating system for security reasons — that’s a good idea. But Apple doesn’t have a practice of identifying security holes they patch with a new release. And sometimes a new OS version will make software stop running on a Mac. This is why backups are a vital complement to any security updating. (more…)

Mail checks get easier

Apple’s Steve Jobs waltzed around onstage for more than 90 minutes this morning, much of it showing off the soon-to-be-shipping iPhone 4 at the Apple WorldWide Developers’ Conference. While the new phone is 24 percent thinner than the current iPhones, the most impressive business feature comes from the new iPhone OS. Apple has renamed this operating environment iOS, because it runs the iPods, iPads, and the phone.

iOS 4 makes a distinct difference to Apple’s Mail program on the iPhone and the iPad and Touch iPod. Instead of breaking down your mail checking into multiple tries, Mail now consolidates your different accounts into a single “All Inboxes” menu item.

The current state of affairs is frustrating if you use more than one mail account, which is the case for so many small businesspeople. Your personal email goes to a separate account — or at least a separate email address. The new iOS 4 understands that you’ve got multiple personalities for mail.

The iOS 4 will be available to the iPhone and iPod Touch users later this month. The new environment brings things like a $4.99 iMovie, a choice of search engines including Microsoft’s Bing (take that, Google) and a PDF viewer that’s going to make long documents easier to read on Apple’s mobile devices. The Reader will be worked right into the iBooks application.

Oh yeah, and there’s that multitasking thing in the new iOS4, too. Palm hammered Apple on it all of last year until the Palmsters had to sell themselves off to HP. It was not a big enough deal to save the Pre, but Apple’s got the feature now. It’s probably best used with the newest Apple mobile devices, though — for reasons below.

Using iOS 4, there are now folders to organize that mess of apps so many of us have on our Apple mobile devices. But perhaps the best news of all for business phone users involves battery life. The new Apple chip just made things last a lot longer. (more…)

In its public beta version, Chrome was just an experimental browser, at first without even bookmark management. In spite of Infoworld declaring “Firefox is dead” this year, at least that browser for the Mac is years beyond experimental status. But as of this week, Chrome for the Mac is out of beta test and into a full release, the first of many. It’s promised to be fast, open and secure. A business user might consider Chrome as their window to the Web.

Picking a browser is like choosing a home repair store. You develop a habit of using one and stop thinking about the alternatives. Chrome is definitely a faster browser than Firefox in our use, delivering a payoff in the “time is money” formula. If you browse a lot, Chrome could be an upgrade. (Safari’s performance is much closer to Chrome’s)

But Chrome’s got some steps to catch up in other areas. In the Mac version we downloaded this week, some Web sites aren’t working completely. Our TypePad account editor (where we publish the 3000 NewsWire blog) won’t let us resize graphics for posts in Chrome. The editing features at the Constant Contact email site also won’t perform with Chrome for the Mac, either.

This puts Chrome in a category with the iPad: very fast and slick for consumption of information. Not so good for creating messages and more. As for the death of Firefox, that obituary shouldn’t be written yet. 350 million users won’t expire overnight. (more…)