It was a surprising gaffe to see an Apple demo with a hole on Wednesday, when Steve Jobs did a demo of the new iPad. But there on the screen were holes in “the best way to browse the Web.”

Those holes on the browser’s screen were Flash videos, built in to sites like The New York Times and Time magazine. Flash is everywhere except the iPad and iPhone. Apple doesn’t like it because Flash is a hog, a tar-pit that brings the iPhone to a crawl. And apparently the iPad, even with the hot A4 processor Apple built to drive the device.

What’s a business need Flash for, anyway? Well, information presented quickly. Hit the Wall Street Journal’s front page with an iPhone to see what you’re missing. All the video, that’s what. A 2-minute video summary can be the best way to find an overview of a business story. It’s a stubborn oversight for the iPad and Apple to sneer at Flash. At the WSJ site it’s especially important, because the paper is now owned by News Corp., which runs a little thing called Fox News.

There will be a lot of business information on the Journal’s site that won’t appear on an iPad. Jobs’ blinders during the demo were among the most un-Apple-like facets I’ve seen from the company. Especially in front of an audience of journalists in the media.

The articles are starting to appear today about Flash being missing. The LA Times posted an item this morning that compared Apple’s absence on the Flash team with Adobe’s desire to put the product onto iPads and iPhones. The disconnect shows two things to a business customer. First, Apple wants a video standard they can control or influence, like the pretty-green HTML5. Second, that no matter how fast you think your hardware is on your business tool, there’s always something to stop it dead. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s apparently a lot to complain about since Apple launched the iPad era yesterday. A gauntlet of Engadget writers gave a series of ho-hum, “who-needs-it” reviews today. Some wanted to chide Apple for not reinventing the personal computer, especially after the rumor mills and hypesters had lifted this tablet to breakthrough status.

It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.

In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)

The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.

But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s new tablet is called the iPad. The breakthrough device is starting at $499, somehow — a price point nobody predicted, although larger memory capacities (up to 64GB) will be more. The base model is 16GB, still a lot of storage until you start downloading video. The pricing points kick up a lot for access to a 3G network-enabled version of the iPad. Add $130 to be able to access data — and that’s books, magazines, video and movies and TV, music — from anywhere you can get a 3G signal (ATT’s, although there’s no contract required.)

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Our certified security expert Steve Hardwick reported on a insidious style of hacker attack, one that can infect Macs as well as the Windows world where he works everyday. Here at Bites HQ we use the Intego Software suite (NetBarrier and VirusBarrier) for anti-virus protection. Intego just rolled out X6 versions to protect against newer-style attacks. We’ll see once we complete our testing what’s been added.

Meantime, be careful where you browse in the course of your business. Steve got attacked while shopping for business travel at Expedia. You should always look extra closely at any dialog box on the Mac that advises you to update for security reasons. Apple’s software will never use this language, just advise you an available software update.

By Steve Hardwick, CCISP

Should you be worried about a Web drive-by attack? First off, what is it?

Most Internet users are not familiar with the concept of a Web drive-by attack. The one I recently encountered was scary because of its simplicity and how it preys on security fears. It also underlines how easy it is to create attacks that are targeted to specific operating systems. Mine took place in Windows, but it would be easy enough to target the Mac OS, too.

To be able to infect a computer in a drive-by, the hacker has to trick the end user into loading a piece of malicious code. In the past this was done using e-mail attachments and other applications that were used for file transfer. However there is a growing threat where your Web browser (Firefox, Safari) is used to trick you into downloading and running the virus code. Here is a walkthrough on what I recently encountered as it gives a good understanding of this type of attack. (For anyone who wants a much more in-depth explanation, Virus List is great site to visit.)

I was going to various sites, trusted sites that I have used in the past without any problems. As I arrived at Expedia.com, one of my favorite travel sites to look at air fares, the following screen popped up. When I saw it, my first thought was that I had a virus on my system.

The screen displayed on top of the browser looked identical to Microsoft Forefront Client Security interface, which is the antivirus software (A/V) installed on my PC. Even the progress bars moved on the display and the virus list was populated. To all intents and purposes it looked and felt like I had a bad case of several viruses on my system. After the virus list had been completed I got the two more screens.

Fortunately I am well-versed in security products. As soon as I was asked to run a program outside of my A/V application the alarm bells started to ring. I also noticed that the file had been downloaded to my PC from a Web site I did not recognize. This is not usual behavior for an anti-virus program. So I decided to hit cancel. When I tried to close any screen I saw the screen above.

Now I was definitely concerned.

Read the rest of this entry »

Storyist
Storyist Software
$59, available via Amazon.com,  downloadable from the Storyist.com site
Compatible with Snow Leopard and older Mac systems

Storytelling software is not word processing. Microsoft made a fortune from Microsoft Word, but a writer who wants to tell a story will want more than the super-formatter from Microsoft brings to their screen. The Mac and storytelling have always been a close fit. Novelists use it, screenwriters even more so. If you’ve got an extensive business report or an article to compose, this is the kind of tool that can help your business. How close your work habits match a tool like Storyist will determine how much help such this software can deliver.

Storyist has been around for more than two years, and I’ve aimed my work at it through several versions. I got excited about the 2.0 release when I saw creator Steve Shepard demonstrate it at the 2009 Macworld Expo. A few months later a shipping version arrived (a license-free review copy.) I’ve spent time trying to slip my chapters of a new novel into what looks like a handsome template.

What follows will lead you into the details of startup, something a writer with experience in submission formats cares about. This kind of software tool is as personal as a barber or a massage artist. You try candidates until you feel the fit. While I waited on the 2.0 Storyist, I poured a 300-page novel into the competing Scrivener, from Literature and Latte. The latter program was the first I managed to fit around the massive body of my work.

So I had a standard to compare with Storyist. But the disadvantage any competitor brings are also its distinctions. “This is the way we do it,” Storyist says while I push words, sections, and chapters into it. Like understanding the difference between Swedish and Shiatsu massage, getting comfy with this program’s style was my first step in the road to crafting a story with Storyist. But the program is very big on pre-planning. Novelists call these distinctions “plotters” versus “pantsers” (as in by-the-seat-of).

I wish some of Storyist fundamentals didn’t need me to belt up my pants so early on. When I type a tab in a creative writing tool, I expect an indent — not a beep that rolls you into a menu of styles. That feels like a screenwriting choice, and I wanted to be able to keep my manuscript drafting simple. Storyist’s defaults and styles need to be scrutinized before your storytelling can begin. Read the rest of this entry »

Businesses need security even more than personal computer users. We’ve got sensitive financial data from customers; we’ve got more banking sites than consumers, including credit card merchant accounts like American Express Merchant Services — which hates to send a statement by paper. We’ve got customer lists that competitors might like to have. We’ve got business plans that forecast our steps to grow. And so on.

And so passwords are more important to a small business user. Yours are probably not good enough, according to a thoughtful article from the Australian outlet of the popular lifehacker.com Web site.

The only truly secure way to store your passwords is to use a password manager to securely track your passwords, combined with a a great master password to protect the rest of your saved passwords — if you use an easy password for your password manager, it would be easy to crack with a brute force attack. Don’t lure yourself into a false sense of security by just using one — your password manager password should be at least 10 alpha-numeric characters if you really want to be secure.

Five simple rules to make a very complex padlock for your sensitive stuff.

1. More characters are better
2. Words are bad — scramble them
3. Always include special characters like %
4. Upper and lower-case both, please
5. Don’t forget to use numerals, too

Firefox will give you a score on how good your master password is. So will a fine open-source password manager that runs on the Mac, KeePassX. It organizes your passwords by type, lets you look them up and more. Version 0.4 (okay, it’s not a commercial product yet) is free. We’ve tested it on Snow Leopard and it works great. KeePassX will copy any password into your Mac’s clipboard, so you can paste it into a Web site. At some point early in this whole protection process, however, you will need to create a password that unlocks your password manager’s database. This is the only password your manager cannot store, of course. And it’s the last one that you want to forget. Read the rest of this entry »

For a few hours yesterday, a breathless rumor floated up about HP and Microsoft unveiling a tablet mobile device that could steal Apple’s thunder about its upcoming iSlate. The interesting part of the rumor was that it emerged in The New York Times.

The Grey Lady used to be more cautious about its speculations, but the staff flowing in from online jobs have stretched the rumor envelope. The tiny article in the Times‘ Bits blog was written by Ashlee Vance, new to the newspaper’s staff after a long and flashy run at the Web site The Register.

The Microsoft “slate computer” was supposed to be part of MS VP Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech last night. Alas, what some around HP are calling The Courier didn’t debut. Vance wrote great articles for The Register, but the standards for rumors are limbo-low over there.

Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer during his evening keynote.

The Times only posted the initial rumor article on the Bits blog, not in a printed edition, so the editors only figured they had to post a generic follow-up today on the non-story. The rumor report shows how little can be counted upon for innovation from Microsoft. HP has had its hands on touchscreen technology since 1984, but the last two years it has had serious touch products released. Last night’s cobble was not one of them.

One of the best summaries of What Just Didn’t Happen came in the comments to the Vance article. One reader quoted the line from the article, “So the last thing Mr. Ballmer wants to hold up is a me-too device,” then added

The good news for MS: That didn’t happen.
The bad news for MS: Nothing else happened, either. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no denying the charms and talents of Google’s new smartphone entry, even compared to Apple’s iPhone. But while the Nexus One delivers some business tools unavailable on iPhones today, Apple must be pleased about the tomorrows for its mobile lineup. Google is increasing demand for something better than a laptop with Nexus One. Apple already has ideas about a laptop-buster.

The Nexus One makes voice navigation more universal than on iPhones. This can be useful in a hands-free environment to enter text in any field on the phone, simply by speaking it. Voice recognition has been improving over the decades — it started in the ’90s — but it’s caliber remains uneven. Such applications deliver on their promise when great development emerges from software companies. Google has little to do with that delivery.

That’s the same rules Apple plays under for the iPhone. It’s all about the apps, baby. There’s a fresh one out that controls a car using your iPhone. Not something that most small businesses need, sure. But that app shows off the range of development for the iPhone. It’s almost a cliche by now, but “there’s an app for that” is the core strength of choosing an iPhone.

Apple’s is likely to be glad for yesterday’s press conference about what Google calls a “superphone” (smartphone is so 2009, I guess). But nobody is killing off anybody’s phone entry anymore. It’s all become a matter of what kind of smart, super mobile phone you want to use. iPhone is better integrated with the rest of the Apple line, so it’s in heavy use here at the Bites HQ. Fewer than one phone out of five is a smartphone today, so there’s so much open market to grab with a new device.

What’s most interesting is how these “phones” are being used. They’re likely to replace a lot of laptops, being mobile computers. Apple doesn’t have just an app for that replacement. It’s got a tablet computer coming, according to industry reports. The company hopes to change the mobile computing game with that entry. Read the rest of this entry »

The 25 percent-off discount for Macworld Conference packages has been extended through midnight Pacific time Tuesday (Jan 5). The two-day extension includes the offer of a $10 Expo Pass, which can educate about business solutions as much as many training sessions.

But even one day of those sessions is only $79 through tomorrow night. Some reports show that more than 20,000 attendees are already registered for the first Macworld Expo that won’t have an Apple keynote or a booth. The conference begins in earnest Feb. 11 and features its first Saturday hours this year.

Register at the Expo Web site using the priority code MWHOLIDAY to get the discounts.

A series of software tools for transforming PDF files will be getting a more powerful version this month, as Recosoft releases PDF2Office Professional 5.0. These tools are a little bit of magic, converting the PDFs you get from clients and allies into documents you can change and extend with your own programs like Microsoft Word, Excel or InDesign. There’s even a version that changes PDF files into the iWork formats — read for Apple’s Pages documents (for word processing) or Numbers (for spreadsheets).

The upcoming 5.0 release of PDF2Office converts PDF files directly to native Excel spreadsheet formats. It has added formatting options refine to cell formatting and worksheet/workbook composition. Version 5.0 will convert PDF files directly to Microsoft’s Office 2007/2008 (.docx, .pptx and .xlsx) formats.

When collaborating with other small businesses and colleagues, work sometimes arrives in PDF format. The Recosoft tools unlock the basic contents so they can be reshaped for enhancement and more content. If you’ve ever been expected to edit a document that arrives as a PDF, this can save a lot of time. The company also sells a product to transform PDF files to Adobe’s InDesign format.

PDF2Office sells for $129, with multiple-license discounts available.