On a recent trip I picked up a copy of The Atlantic, the aging magazine that used to feature reports from the fine James Fallows on subjects of technology. Fallows is a business writer as much as a technical savant, and he brought a generation of experience to his work. Alas, a replacement editor falls well short of that skill set in assessing the iPad’s chances to change mobile computing. Megan McArdle, the magazine’s business and economics editor, wrote this under-researched assessment of a product she’s never used.

The iPad does a bunch of things, but none of them exceptionally well. You can’t read it in full daylight, and its battery life is much shorter than Kindle’s. With no true built-in keyboard or ability to multitask, it’s not a substitute for a laptop — and unlike my iPhone, it won’t fit in a pocket, take pictures, or make calls. Unless you need it for one of its speciality uses, it doesn’t replace anything you already have; it’s just one more thing to carry.

Pages, from Apple's video demo

It appears McArdle is among the unwashed masses of journalists who didn’t enjoy a few minutes with the real product before writing her April piece on Kindle vs. iPad. I’ve owned the former for a year and expect the latter within the week. But it’s possible that McArdle will want to revise her gradecard about “doing nothing exceptionally well.” All she needs to motivate her corrections are the Apple videos online this week showing off Mail and Pages, the iPad’s e-mail and writing tools. Yes, this might be something else to carry — something more useful to a business than a copy of The Atlantic. Aside from a smartphone like the 3GS iPhone, I can’t see what else she would need to tote. And at just 24 ounces, this new Apple tool is likely to carry a heft to make the 6-ounces of April’s Atlantic seem like dead weight. Read the rest of this entry »

A long list of apps ready for the iPad has emerged on the Web at appadvice.com, but two seem destined to perform business organization duties. Infinote turns the tablet into a canvas of endless capacity, to enable you to create notes quickly, color-coded and reorganizable by simply dragging them across the screen.

That’s likely to be the iPad at it’s best: the touch interface that delivers the index-card organization skills of the prior century, without all the erasing and the need for a full boardroom-sized table.

Infinote is going to sell for just $2.99, priced as any app for the iPhone. On the other end of the pricing scale, The Omni Group will be releasing its flagship OmniGraffle visualizer and process charting tool. While Infinote is certain to be worth its price, it will be interesting to see the takeup on an iPad program priced closer to Mac software levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Companies may be thinking of Apple’s new iPad as a business tool, because Apple’s tool box has run dry for about two unexpected days this month. Orders placed for the revolutionary tablet are now promised to ship by April 12; orders placed by March 27 are set to arrive on the original April 3 date.

That a unseen device which starts at $499 blew out its initial run in two weeks of sales is a sure sign that small business owners are investing in the new mobile form factor. Apple may have engineered the size of its first run to ensure a sellout before first delivery. Whatever the reason, e-mail notices arrived this morning that first shipments have left Apple’s plants to arrive by April 3.

Wiley Publishing thinks that you can, running into Apple Mac territory with its training book Teach Yourself Visually: Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The book series that promises you can “Read Less – Learn More” unspools more than 300 full-color pages of instruction on the full range of everyday use of the Mac’s latest operating system release.

If you haven’t seen one of these books, it may not be easy to describe how much color and how many screen shots prance across the pages. This is a book for the switcher who’s moved from a business Windows system to the simplicity of the Mac — or a more advanced user who needs a quick refresher and can just scan a picture to recall how to reset a forgotten password.

The emphasis here is on the complete set of computing tasks at an everyday level. Using the Dock, entering a Web address into Safari, composing email in Mail, locating files you’ve downloaded from the Web: it’s all shown screen by screen in Paul McFriederies’ book. The lessons are broken down into two-page spreads with alternative methods for some tasks, such as uninstalling applications or customizing the Dock. Read the rest of this entry »

We ordered our first iPad for Bites HQ on Friday, dropping into the Apple online store to plunk down a $499 pre-order for a WiFi model with 16GB of memory. It was the minimal investment to get a business tool in our hands — and see what it might be worth.

It’s a beloved bromide that you shouldn’t buy a 1.0 version of anything computing-related. Some say that you’re only helping the manufacturer iron out the bugs in such an early version of a product. Apple has fired a warning shot across the bow of us eager sailors, cresting into the uncharted iPad waters. If your iPad develops a charging problem, the vendor advises, it will only be $99 to replace the battery. Yeah, an extra $99, plus tax and the pain of parting with your new tool. Apple will give you a refurbished model as a replacement, so you need to have dumped your data into your Mac before the pokey iPad goes into the post.

Us early adopters take such arrows in the back as an expected part of being the first on our block. Apple enjoyed a healthy 1.0 release of the iPod (I owned mine within the first month in 2001), while the iPhone was much better on second and third releases than the $599 rollout model. (We added ours last year, about two years after the intro.) But we invested in the 1.0 iPad because it might move the needle a lot for quick computing, the kind that a small business needs to keep up with a jammed to-do list. That’s an experience we want to share first-hand, instead of repeat from others.

One of our allies, Bruce Hobbs of Engineered Software, is developing iPad applications after decades serving the HP enterprise business community. Hobbs is enlisting other software writers with experience in COBOL, a bedrock business language, to create something new for the iPad.

I’ve been reading books about and working through tutorials on Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder and iPhone and Mac OS X development. Michael Watson and I took a two-day iPhone development course back in November. I’ve also been attempting, with limited success, to lure a couple of other HP 3000 COBOL developers into a joint effort. Not sure yet exactly what we’ll put together, but I’m still hoping to have something in the App Store before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.