A few years ago Filemaker released the Bento database, a slimmed down and gussied up version of it’s flagship product. Bento has grown up over those years, and now Filemaker has skimmed off some of its easy to use features in a version 1.0 for the iPad. I had a dream of making this pocket-sized product do some of the work that a mobile pro, like my wife the yoga teacher, would need in classrooms. Alas, the iPad Bento can’t perform those deep poses yet.

That doesn’t mean the product isn’t worth the $4.99 it costs at the App Store. Bento arrived with a one-page home screen meant to serve as a manual, a handful of database templates (these are called Libraries in Bento) and three skins to style my creations.

But say, for example, you wanted to assign several attributes to an item in an inventory. iPad Bento doesn’t get the idea of multiple tick boxes for one record. It wants you to create a field for every attribute like overseas item, tax free, custom sized and the like.

As a database Bento has gotten so minimalistic in its mobile versions that it seems suited only for a very personal information manager. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s good to know going on how much you can fit into this Bento’s box.

Apple pointed to the sales of the iPhone as the primary factor in its $13.4 billion Q2 report this week. The device, which Apple sold more than 8.7 million units of, is becoming the equivalent of the inkjet cartridge at HP. High volume, high profit, and a very different product than the company has been known for. You might argue that the iPhone has little to do with the mission of the Mac. But you won’t be throwing away an iPhone every month, like those HP ink cartridges. Using an iPhone in conjunction with a Mac makes the mobile device act like an extension of the computer.

What works in Apple’s favor it that the iPhone has plenty of competition, but no direct knock-offs. It’s the Apple product most likely to introduce the company’s computer solutions to a first-time customer. The second most likely product? The Mac itself. Apple said about 300,000 Macs sold at the Apple retail stores during Q2 went to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Apple cites a “stronger product mix” including more iPhone sales while explaining how it beat analyst estimates by more than 2 percent for margins. Then there’s the $47 billion in cash the company reported for the period ending March 31: A lot of clams to toss at whatever research and development opportunities emerge.

Apple pointed at its “first mover” opportunity with the iPad as one place where it intends to exploit its advantages with fresh investment. Apple expects to release iPad units in 9 overseas countries by the end of May and ship the 3G versions by the first week of May.

One analyst said the iPad has a chance to become “the Mac of the masses.” In the 1980s Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” Many analyst questions during the Q2 conference Q&A covered the iPad. As of this week, one tracking site estimates more than 1 million iPads in use: An introductory rate that outstrips the adoption of the iPhone in its first quarter of sales. Perhaps what the iPhone has done for Apple is a sign of what the iPad might add in several years.

Apple just announced a record $3 billion in profits and $13.5 billion in sales for the quarter that ended three days before the iPad was delivered. The company’s COO Tim Cook said the company was confident about future quarters, too.

Meanwhile, the stock is starting to approach the estimates that analysts clocked in once the drumbeat of iPad took off. As of this afternoon, the Associated Press reports that shares are at $261 each, about an 8 percent after-hours rise after trading was suspended during today’s Q2 news conference. One investment house thought earlier this month that shares could hit $300 during 2010.

Once upon a time, the analysts and industry experts were predicting nothing as different as Apple’s products could succeed. The company is now at a $50 billion run rate, something that goes along well with a No. 1 rating in most innovative companies (BusinessWeek) and the No. 38 spot in the latest Fortune 500.

Investment in Apple solutions can get looked at askance in some companies. Doing this well in the latest quarter, when Apple sold 3 million Macs in addition to its mobile products, ought to qwell any kvetching you may hear from corporate IT.

We’ll have more tomorrow on today’s Q&A between stock analysts and Cook.

Complete instruction and training, but O'Reilly offers a better deal

An iPhone problem led me into my library of O’Reilly Missing Manuals, an ever-growing sheaf of pages that’s approaching one full foot of dandy advice and training. A Missing Manual for Apple products is often likely to have the crack advice of David Pogue among its authors, making them a pleasure to read and a complete resource. (Pogue created the Missing Manual series.)

But a Missing Manual book is also bound up by the Curse of the Index. Nobody can reference every entry for every word in a book made of paper. The index would run longer than the content. You can spend awhile searching a handful of entries in a paper book, and even if the advice is inside, locating it among 600-odd pages takes time. You might be at deadline on a project and wish there was a faster method to solving a problem — so you can avoid the line at the Apple Genius Bar at the retail stores (if that’s even an option.)

O’Reilly’s got a shortcut for your fixit dilemma. Today the solution is e-books, editions of these Manuals you download and read on a Mac, an iPhone, a Kindle or yes, even the new iPad. Today, all e-book purchases are half-off, in celebration of Earth Day.

I already had the iPhone Missing Manual in my library last weekend, when my iPhone refused to sync up and cough up its photos. I wanted to push a new album onto the phone to show some images to a client. The new iPad was in use elsewhere at Bites HQ. The solution to the iPhone problem was inside the Missing Manual. I might have found it faster if I owned an e-book version instead. Read the rest of this entry »

MacPractice has been selling Mac solutions for dentists and doctors for many years. Now the software company reports that “We’ve been overwhelmed with requests from doctors who want to use MacPractice on the iPad.” The developer of practice management and clinical software on Macs and iPhones isn’t writing an iPad app for now. Instead, it’s using one of the more powerful gateways on the new device: VNC.

Virtual Network Computing allows any user to send keyboard and mouse input across a wireless network, or even through secure Internet connections, to a Mac application like MacPractice. VNC has been built into the Mac since the 10.4 Tiger release. But a multitouch mobile device like the iPad, with its larger screen, is pushing VNC into service at medical practices with the speed of an unchecked infection.

MacPractice has set up a guide on the interaction between its Mac and iPhone apps and the iPad. The link is made possible through Aqua Connect, which has integrated its remote access software with the MacPractice products. There are plenty of VNC clients available for Apple’s mobile devices, all aimed at letting a business use an iPhone or iPad connect with Mac-based software. Read the rest of this entry »

Moving among publication spreads is as simple as leafing through a paper edition on Zinio's iPad app.

Creating content is still months away from the iPad’s capabilities, but consuming information is ready today. While publishers like Time-Warner want you to purchase single issues of their magazines for the iPad (at about $5 each), Zinio has a free app and a better idea: delivery of a paid full year’s subscription, ready to display on that gorgeous mobile screen.

Zinio’s app provides able organization of your subscriptions, although arranging the magazines seems to be left to alphabetical order. Multiple issues get archived on the device, but you can delete them to save space and just re-download them if you need to read from the past.

The response you see on the iPad while you initially access a magazine can be ultra-subtle at first glance. The app uses Apple’s spinning clock icon while it downloads enough issue to get your reading started. If you noticed the word “download” used regularly up to now, that’s because there’s no other way to enjoy the brilliant pages off the Zinio newsstand. The equivalent of magazine streaming doesn’t exist anywhere yet. And so your initial steps into iPad reading are limited by the size of your WiFi bandwidth.

The full range of Zinio’s newsstand is not yet ready for iPad consumption, because some pubs use Flash in their presentation. Zinio makes its sales and delivery services available to all publishers, but the pubs themselves are in charge of de-Flashing their content. Or more accurately, adding a non-Flash version to their issues. It also bears a mention here that Zinio is selling product without being forced to pay Apple a share of what it collects for its publishers. Apple has a fine walled garden going on in the App Store, but Zinio’s app gives you a gateway into a larger world of purchasing.

The clearest beauty of using the Zinio app comes in zooming into a graphic. National Geographic put together a lively interactive version of its April edition that covers water — and a map of “the third pole” in Asia that might span only the space of two NatGeo paper pages gets the zoom-in treatment on the iPad, so you can enjoy the information at a larger scale than paper could provide. On the downside, we couldn’t get a video feature of the NatGeo sample to run on our iPad, even though the bandwidth was wide open. The fault here might lie with NatGeo, Apple or even the app. This month, many things on the iPad feel like a 1.0 experience.

You can shop for extra subscriptions or single issues through Zino’s iPad app, once you set up an account and provide a credit card number. Many of the publications will sell you back issues, though this kind of one-off reading can get pricey. Subs run from about $10 (a year of SmartMoney) to $46 (52 issues of BusinessWeek) up to 52 issues of The Economist at $126.99. This kind of single-touch shopping will remind you of browsing in Apple’s App Store or the iTunes store: a place where a purchase can be as spontaneous and quick as a meeting requires you to be prepared for. If you love magazines as I do, this app can make the experience addictive. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend and marketing analyst sent me his belief that Apple’s campaign against Flash was a mistake and might cripple the company’s empire. Guy Smith of Silicon Strategies Marketing, who consults for software and hardware makers on marketing around the world, looks at CEO Steve Jobs’ anti-Flash campaign as a rare error. Blocking Flash from the iPad and iPhone cuts off content, Guy said, adding in his latest post that “Jobs is trying to string-up Adobe, and in the end might make Apple look like Il Duce on his last day.”

The latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything.  Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. (Jobs is obviously not a Windows user, for he does not know the true meaning of “buggy.”)

Such bogus blusters are convenient covers for real issues. Flash currently commands a huge share of the Rich Internet Application market by virtual of antediluvian virtualization.  Long ago, Flash did what people wanted, which was to add value to surfing the Web while eliminating cross platform/browser/religious sectarianism.  Want to watch videos of cute kittens or suicidal teenagers on motorcycles, or listen to the latest excuse for music coming out of Nashville on the Web, regardless of  whether you are on a PC, Mac, Linux, minis, odd ducks, occasional mainframes, virtual desktops or smart phone?  Adobe Flash made it happen by bundling [the player] for free into everything. Except iPhones and iPads.

[To be accurate, Flash is only bundled long enough to force you to update it via download, to combat the latest malware and virus attacks. Much of the bundled Flash is already out of date by the time a new Windows or Mac system boots up. But Guy continues on eliminating Flash from Apple's most mobile devices.]

Therein lay Apple’s finest error (aside from the Newton).  As any performer will attest, you give the audience what they want. Putting Snoop Dogg on stage at a cotillion is an error.  So is creating an information/media device that does not deliver information/media.  Since so much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash, and since Adobe is not sitting still in extending Flash for ever better uses, banning it from hardware is inane.  It goes directly against what the audience (market) wants and thus gives them the motivation to consider alternate venues.

First, the Apple devices deliver information and media. Plenty, just not that written to run on Flash Player. To the resulting consideration of alternate venues, I say, “So what? Assume that happens — then what?” So then I’m buying an HP Slate to run Flash? “So much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash,” that’s a real longshot. The key to track the Flash future is the phrase from above, “Long ago, Flash did what people wanted.” Long ago, people watched cable TV for the latest news, too. And Seinfeld. And modems that winked up when you got connected to the Internet.

I disagree with Guy about the iPad’s need for Flash, in part because between the two of us only I own an iPad, and so and have the same 10 days of experience as every other owner. (Perhaps not exactly the same experience; I didn’t buy the $49.95 OmniGraffle app for it [think Windows' Visio planning]. On the other hand, I wrote most of my reply to Guy off an Apple Keyboard Dock, and plenty of people are still waiting for that marvel.) I haven’t missed Flash more than a handful of times out of hundreds of media and content deliveries.

I told Guy he simply needed to see the iPad in action to observe how a Flash-less experience means less than you’d think to business content today — and perhaps little to nothing once content providers adapt to millions of iPads joining the 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches out there. The only difference is that Apple has decided to make a stand against Flash now, after selling 85 million devices that don’t use it.
Read the rest of this entry »

The newest tool in Apple’s business arsenal is starting to see its accessories arrive in customer hands and on hooks at the local Apple retail store. But many more providers are waiting until the end of this month to roll out the business suits that iPads will wear on client visits: covers and cases.

One significant accessory that arrived in our offices yesterday was the iPad Keyboard Dock. At $69 it’s priced at about 10 percent of the cost of a top-end WiFi iPad, and it is a slim offering indeed. Think of Apple’s standard mini-keyboard, then slap on a plastic extender with a mini-USB port and external headphone outlet, and you’ve got the total feature set of the Keyboard Dock.

The Keyboard Dock only extends the keyboard width about a total of 3 inches from the on-screen keyboard in the iPad’s landscape mode. But since the iPad has no dock on its longer side, you can only use the Keyboard Dock in portrait mode. If you’re still looking for a dock for your iPad, in these early days of the tablet’s life you could do worse than getting a Keyboard Dock. Apple’s standard iPad dock sells for $29, and its wireless keyboard, sans dock but able to talk to the iPad, sells for the same price as a Keyboard Dock. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress worked up an app ready for Day One that taps the internal keyboard

Of all of the surprises in the first two days of using an iPad, the biggest one may be the easiest to put my finger on. The keyboard built into this tool is good enough for a first draft at touch typing speeds. That Apple would have been able to concoct such a thing, when others have failed at including such a fundamental, says a lot about the creative utility of this device.

The paragraph above would have taken so much longer to draft on an iPhone, and would have been torture on a OLPC portable computer. I compare the iPad to the OLPC because the latter’s designers believed children would create music, stories, art, even programs with it. Apple hasn’t mounted a big push yet for creating via the iPad. It’s positioned this year as a tool to consume. But give the market six months to fire up the tools and attachments like mics, cameras, input devices and more extensive editing, and this might become the most mobile of workbenches.

The debate around the iPad has included questions about what it might kill, or just replace. These are the wrong questions, but it’s no surprise to hear them. Very new things rattle most of us. We need to find a place for them and so we compare. Like a Kindle? Not exactly, but you can read business books on it. Like a laptop, then. Not so much either, since local file storage and attached things like disks aren’t there yet. Like a netbook, maybe? The iPad might look the same size, but it won’t run several programs at once. Its Safari browser won’t even let you keep multiple pages open using tabs.

All such features that prove to be important to new users will surface. And some tools for existing Macs are already on hand to help. The Bluetooth keyboards and headsets, and a Mac app called PhoneView, are examples of how the demand will create tools for creation. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s addictive, using it. One of the first things I realized this morning was that I’ll have to put the iPad up for awhile to let it recharge, after 12 hours of use. Those four Dexter episodes Abby and I streamed in a row over Netflix last night never would’ve been possible on the Macbook’s battery life, and the Sony Netflix streaming DVD player is just a bafflement to set up. I think the reviewer at BoingBoing got it right when she said that this thing, like the “Pre or the iPhone before it, scratches an itch we didn’t know we had.”

The OLPC -- how 2007!

But I knew I needed a better reach to scrape up creations, on the move. Two years ago I bought a One Laptop Per Child mobile PC, hoping to have something light and slim and agile enough to take anyplace to do my writing and research via the Web. When the computer showed up at the door — a twin of it had been donated to the the OLPC charity — the mini-laptop was a bust. Yes, it was brute simple and built to be rugged as a tank. Yes, it could touch the Internet and came packed with software. The computer was really the first netbook, but the comparison goes right to the woes that the netbooks will fight. Its keyboard was a plastic sheathed toy, its screen a shuddering reminder of the 1980s portables’ ghostly gray, the software cobbled from open source and freeware that made it easy to understand how it had arrived at its price. The battery was in regular need of charging, especially after any Web use.

This mini computer suffered from the same curse the tech wizards claimed for the iPad’s fate: it did many things, none of them very well. It was a snazzy green and white concept car of a computer with lots of good ideas assembled by committee. It never made it out of my office, so immobile its charms proved to be. Recently the OLPC group asked us all if we’d donate our minis back to the foundation. They might have heard nobody was getting much use from them.

These are the battles that a mobile computer must win. Its interface must be seamless, intuitive, flexible. Its display must be attractive, enticing you to stay in its playground. It must be responsive in its speed and generous in its possibility to entertain and present. It must stay alive a single charge long enough to use it all day — and have enough left for it to be waiting for you to pop in that last sentence that came to you in the middle of the night. It must connect you to those you know and everything you don’t over the Web. And it has to be mobile enough to carry around as if it were a coffee mug: not something you would ever think of jamming into a pocket, but a thing you don’t even consider when you move from room to room, office to office, sandbox to chalkboard and back.

There are surprises among our iPad’s first day, but nothing to keep it from coming out to play, or work. I haven’t found Flash missing because I didn’t rely on it for anything but games. And this entry? Typed on the built-in keyboard of the iPad. I left the click-sound-effects on, to help me get used to the rhythm. (But that’s not a sound you want your wife to wake to, sleeping next to you while the words come upon you in the dark. You can shut it off.)

It’s addictive, intuitive and inventive, this slender device. It’s a tool that has made the leap from toy, turning mobile into a real option for creating as well as consuming. Pages for the iPad makes it possible to get a good start on my writing, then share it forward to the Web or my Mac. Read the rest of this entry »