But the thing that sets this nav app apart is that you’re not buying maps to use it. There are no in-app $49 purchases for North American roads. CoPilot is sold with maps included and free updates How’s that possible? Well for one thing, they do their own maps, instead of paying a third party. Then there’s the company background: they sell truck fleet software and have for 25 years. You don’t have to care about how CoPilot does its business but you’ll want them to keep up with those free maps. Nav apps can get expensive in several ways

But before we look at that, let’s do a discount dance. Until the end of this week the CoPilot app is $9.95, the iPad version $14.95. Discounts a-plenty here in Macworld week. Even at the regular prices this app looks like it can lead you to better value for nav.

You have to watch out for the hidden costs in nav apps. If your maps are free, are you sucking down piles of data through your data plan? Not with CoPilot. Are you paying for updates to those maps? A larger business can afford that kind of thing, but wouldn’t you rather be spending that on entertaining clients, or just a better bed on the road?

Doing your own maps makes the fixed cost of CoPilot Live sustainable. You will probably care more about being able to drag your route dynamically on the screen, or routes for optimal gas consumption. Or locating waypoints through several resources. All without leaving the app. You care about that because at the heart of it, using this kind of app happens on the road, while you move at 55 MPH. You use the app in bed, too, to plan the next day’s travels.

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Although it’s diminished from its heyday of crowding both North and South Moscone Center exhibit halls — the whole thing has been in the more cozy Moscone West for two years — Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark in attendance these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, even though it’s thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry — which if you take a moment to consider it, becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there’s a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I’m not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you’re making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.

This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience — Active Directory, that sort of thing — can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen at left is on a Macbook Air.)  After all, inside the heart of Apple’s products beats Unix, the original “open” system that’s supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn’t the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won’t be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.

Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I’ve worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple’s products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there’s cloud computing to take the place of vendor-specialized databases. For companies leaving the world of classic IT, this cloudy future is helping to make Apple’s business outlook brighter.

Padmanaban is clear-eyed about the hurdles the Mac faces in IT strategy. “Corporations have trouble adopting Macs because while Macs are beautiful and sleek, but Windows applications don’t run on them, and it’s very hard to secure a Mac,” she said. “What we do is take your standard corporate Windows environment and make it a secure managed app on a Mac.” Using a concept that Intel calls Intelligent Desktop virtualization, it means that the Mac takes an equal but familiar place on the console for corporate computing, with Windows losing none of its compatibility with the likes of SQL Server or even a 3000-savvy database like Eloquence for Windows. Mokafive provisions corporate Windows environments for the Mac desktops. You free your users to bring in that Macbook Air they want to use on the job.

Another way to embrace Windows work on Apple’s products is through virtualization. While this doesn’t provide much of a single-pane administration benefit, the likes of VMWare’s Fusion or Parallels have advanced the cause of emulation. That’s the vehicle that’s carrying MPE into the future. Parallels can either present a Mac-like workspace on the desktop that’s completely outfitted with Windows as well. Or it can give a user the Windows experience by day and let them revert to Mac OS X off the job. There’s a lively competition between Fusion and Parallels that keeps each product improving at a constant rate. Both have gotten three major improvements in the last two years, and at $79 a desktop it’s too inexpensive to trigger even 3000-grade budget shock.

Managing virtualization requires some learning, but it’s a good skill set to acquire going into 2012. On the other hand, Padmanaban claimed that IT managers need “zero additional skills” to deploy and administer Mokafive’s Player, “an app that is running my standard Windows desktops.” She also says that deployment is possible in as little as 90 minutes. The software installation comes on a USB key.

As for the mobile goodies being displayed here, one software solution treats Windows as if it were running on iPads. Splashtop brings the Windows apps and desktops to the ultra-popular tablets by giving the user a remote control of their PCs. (Yes, that’s the usually-reviled but necessary Explorer browser in the picture, running on an iPad that’s controlling a PC remotely.) If an app can run on the PC, it can be used on an iPad. Because it’s an iOS app, the cost is crazy-cheap. This week Splashtop is $2.99 per iPad, and the regular price is only $19.95. I watched a demo that showed a PC desktop running while the iPad gave cursor control, text entry, clicks on buttons — any aspect of an interface required. It gets even better for remote use, because you can use it over a secured wi-fi environment from across the country. At the moment Google Mail somehow tells your desktop to talk to the remote app, since you sign in with a Gmail account on both iPad and PC. Google is far from perfect, but if its apps can be rolled out to the multi-billion dollar BBVA bank enterprise, it’s probably capable of managing the handshake between an iPad and a Windows PC.

Windows and the PC world never cared much about adopting Apple support in the decades where Microsoft had all the mojo. Coming from a humble position in the business world, the Apple solutions have a “can’t we all get along” approach. There are millions of Windows desktops out there. But there are now millions of Apple’s mobile customers bringing along Macs, a market that showed 26 percent growth over the last year versus zero for the rest of the PC industry. Apple products are going to become a management mission for the IT department, driven along by mobile attachments. Although Apple never aimed at becoming an enterprise darling, the business has arrived anyway. It delivers an user experience that can mimic Windows, or something newer and smoother and yes, popular — integrated with the Windows you already are using elsewhere in your business.

Most small business providers have had a constant need for a meeting space away from the office. Especially when that business office is a home office. Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are the obvious options. These are, of course, poor places to Skype into a meeting, given the noise or the lack of privacy. if you’re on the road and away from a hotel, Liquidspace has a solution. But for $50 or more for the hour, if the budget allows, you can reserve a private space including amenities such as wifi, presentation gear, or even enough room to host a group of 15 colleagues or prospects.

The Liquidspace app is free and becoming a member lets you book spaces and get check in passports for exclusive use of a space — or just a $4 seat at a spot like the quiet workspace next to the Caltrain station in San Francisco. Of the 250 spots available now, 150 are in the Bay Area where Liquidspace is growing up.

The new social media capabilities for StreetPilot onDemand integrate Wikipedia, Facebook and foursquare. Users can display locations from these networks on the map and check in upon arrival at their destination. Clicking on one of the Wikipedia icons on the map will reveal detailed information about a location, such as the identity of an interesting building or landmark. Also new for the are visually refined 3D renderings of buildings to provide a better overview.

Garmin’s Tracker app works in conjunction with the GTU 10 tracking device to display its location on a map “to virtually follow anything from your loved-ones to valuables or the family dog. Users can set up a geo-fence to get alerts when the device crosses in or out of a defined area. The latest version of this app now also allows a continuous tracking mode, and enables users to send out map links to others.”

SmartPlans

Left Coast Logic is unveiling new apps and a cloud service at Macworld this week. The SmartDay organizer integrates tasks, events, notes, and projects into one app. The company’s SmartTime logic is behind the organizer. It schedules tasks directly into free time between calendar appointments. SmartDay Mac is the company’s first Mac app, but it includes a feature-set similar to its iPad organizer, SmartPad. The company is also unveiling a web version, mySmartDay.com, that synchronizes with both.

A new version of the SmartPlans app uses Smart logic at a higher level to manage multiple projects within the context of a weekly work balance. Version 3 adds business-oriented features such as milestones and dependencies, but the most significant new feature may be the way it integrates projects into the native iPhone and iPad calendars.

Today’s the last day to get a $75 rate on iWorld, the end of the early-bird registration. They’re also packaging an opening night Blast with the three-days of classes for a total of $110. In fact, today is the last early bird day for all of the Macworld experiences, from pre-show training to the Mac IT meetings for administrators and high-end business users. Even the Expo Pass, the lowliest entry ticket to the January events, goes up by $5 tomorrow.

A full list of everything that’s on offer in the iWorld sessions is online. For example, at 10AM Friday is a Super iPad Tools for Work tech talk that promises to “cover office type applications, presentations without projector, database management, PDF management, outlining and brainstorming, tracking secure data, tracking travel and expenses, dictation and transcription, remote OS administration, making phone calls (on an iPad!), and remote meetings (like WebEx and GoToMeeting).”

You can compare the packages and register to save some dough at the Macworld 2012 website.

The Great Presenter, in his element in earlier days

Steve Jobs, 56 years old and on his third medical leave, has resigned from his job at Apple as CEO. He also left the company with a heritage and credo that can only be compared to Walt Disney’s. Jobs did Walt’s exit even better, naming Tim Cook as successor to the CEO position. Jobs is also remaining as Apple’s Chairman of the Board and a director.

Cook doesn’t have to move anything into a new office, because he’s been running Apple as CEO in fact for much of the last three years. Cook, 50, has been performing CEO duties since the start of this year. He’s been a constant presence in the Apple analyst briefings about the spectacular quarterly results the company has posted for more than six quarters by now. As Jobs’ resignation letter confirms, Apple had a succession plan in place for this day. The succession was swift, unlike the last three changes to the CEO position of Hewlett-Packard. Cook’s election to the CEO post was immediate by the Apple board, based on instructions in the brief letter Jobs used to file his resignation.

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

The markets were skittish about this news in after-hours trading, just as analysts predicted they would be. It will take a few more product introductions to convince investors nothing essential is just about to change, simply because a temporary medical leave became permanent.

In the tone of Jobs’ letter I heard an echo of another that I saw him write. This one was to the employees of NeXT Computer, celebrating the birth of his daughter in 1992. Simple, direct and hopeful. This voice is what’s going to echo through the near future in Cupertino and beyond. It’s the voice that banished doubts about whether simple computing would succeed against popular PCs, and so carve out a future where Apple would become the largest creator of technology in a world that’s still hungry for magic — the kind that Walt gave us.

My wife and I were on a get-to-know-you trip to the Redwood City HQ of NeXT, setting up a relationship between our employer and this brainchild of Jobs’ wilderness years. We took the tour of the campus and saw sleek courtyards and impossibly simple offices and even reception flowing out of hardwood floors, and then sat down in front of a sleek black computer with keyboard to match. What amazed us was a demonstration of email, fully realized even by today’s standards. No baffling addresses to recall and type; they flowed out of an address book. Music and photos were embedded inside the message.

And there on the NeXTstation glimmered the object of Steve’s latest joy, Not the computer, but a newborn daughter. One of her earliest photos that served as the birth announcement, shared with the NeXT staff, underscored by Mozart. Our own lives had three children in them, from age 9 to 19. We instantly understood how life’s important moments could be shared with grace, by using well-built technology. We didn’t meet Jobs on that trip, but came away thinking about the then-37-year-old as a father and a man, as well as a creative genius. The commonalities connected us, because in the end all we have to share that lasts is the love we express.

I came to the meeting that helped to launch NeXT World carrying a fan’s ardor for Jobs’ creations. I lusted after a Mac in 1984 after using a Apple II since 1978. I helped start a writing and publishing company with the Mac SE, lashed to a monitor larger, heavier and more expensive than any my daytime employer (who funded NeXT World) could afford. We created tabloid-sized newspapers at my employer with the Mac Plus at that company, a team of editors squinting into the 9-inch Mac screens to use Pagemaker 1.0. Four of us would hit the same shared disk at once, until the whole network seized up. We’d have to restart. But on our computers this wasn’t remembering a finger combination on the keyboard. We pulled down a menu, so much simpler than the Ctl-Alt-Delete of MS-DOS. Our employers had invested in Apple’s products because they were the best of the time, many years ahead of the PC world’s best desktop publishing of 1987.

Somehow, we saw at the NeXT tour, he had topped what he’d done with the Mac at Apple before they ousted him. The NeXTStation — even the name spoke about his ideals of forward movement through life, leaving your best behind to become better — purred along with Unix. It’s hard to describe what an oxymoron that was in 1992. Unix was becoming a powerful business environment, but geekhood was essential to using it. Engineers used Unix workstations. PCs were dominant, and Macs were for the rest of us. The NeXT environment took the best parts of object-oriented computing and Unix flexibility and hid them under beautiful icons, arrayed in color or sketched in greyscale on different NeXTstation models. The built-in dictionary pronounced words. We saw the Dock in use and wondered how we’d adjust. All of it was carried back to Apple when Jobs returned in 1996. The result was OS X, which is now a decade old and merging with the magic of the iOS mobile world.

By 2005 in his Stanford commencement speech he was talking about how to take the leap towards magic, courting risks. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

With so many stories that I’ve created on Steve Jobs’ products, I feel sad about his resignation. But what a stellar legacy. Now he leads Apple’s board. I compare him to Walt Disney because he is able to inspire the same aura of creativity in his employees. In a poll on the employee satisfaction website Glassceiling.com, Jobs posted a 97 percent approval with the company workers. He’s known for being mercurial and a tyrant at times, but so was Walt.

Many people are writing about the resignation as if it’s Jobs’ obituary. This much is true: the end of one kind of era in the life of this man, and perhaps the end of one generation of CEO brilliance. But after being compared to Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Robert Noyce of Intel and other icons, Jobs represents the new generation of computing giant. He’s put Apple into orbit around our lives, as difficult to ignore as the moon circling our skies.

One of the best essays about the resignation is from Walt Mossberg, one of the deans of technology journalism who writes for The Wall Street Journal. In a column in the WSJ’s All Things Digital website, Mossberg says that now there’s talk of Apple reinventing TV, a keystone of our lives that Jobs once called the most corrosive element in the world. “But at its best, it’s magic,” he added.

In the only instance I saw him at the Reality Distortion Field of Macworld Expo, we sat on the floor in the Moscone Center, waiting to be admitted to the keynote as devotees and customers in 2006, and we dreamed out loud of an Apple bigscreen TV, wired with Mac technology. It didn’t come to pass that year — the Intel uprising was announced instead on that day, and the iPhone followed. Of course, we’ve since learned that the iPhone was just the warmup for the touch technology that the iPad would deliver. I’d be glad to buy any Apple reinvention of the TV. After the Air, the iPad, the iPhone, the iMac, through the dark years, back to the Mac Plus and even to the Apple II, his company’s ideas and ideals have enriched my life.

Although the number of vendors selling solutions, apps and hardware is below the gaudy days when this show spanned both North and South Moscone halls, plus Moscone West for sessions, a rough survey of the 2011 show revealed a bigger share of business-ready help: in apps, in hardware, in Mac software and in advice. Macworld 2009, Apple’s last, had more of everything except business: especially iPhone cases and iPod accessories. Those were still on display last week, along with a wave of iPad holders.

But 2011 was the year when Apple business users could find a Macworld supplier a-selling with no effort at all.

Two years ago, the Enterprise Software Alliance was about the only booth where Windows-friendly Mac software for business was showcased. This year a veteran firm from the Windows virus battlefields, ESET, was selling antivirus and giving away security training. The company said it has muscled antivirus maker Intego out of Apple’s retail store slots with NOD Antivirus 4. It’s called the Business Edition of antivirus for endpoints — what you’d call Macs, but now ESET uses the enterprise-savvy terminology, and perhaps technology, too.The tone of the conference has rolled away from Mac-centric and barreled on to mobile, since those iPhones and iPads have led the charge into businesses for Apple. This year there was an Indie section for Mac software and solution companies, smaller spaces with smaller firms doing novel things. One of the most clever, Dolly Drive, makes Time Machine a most flexible and stronger backup solution for Macs, by adding off-site storage (disks in the vendor’s cloud) plus the ability to create a bootable backup drive when crashes take out a disk. Dolly Drive gives a business user better control over what Time Machine backs up, too, and it sends only changes to files instead of 52 full copies of your Quickbooks file per year.

Backup, security: these are the things that keep computers working for your company so you can focus on your business, not the computers. Schlage showed off a remote lock and lighting control system to secure buildings, including your home office, using an iPad or iPhone as your controller. Schlage includes security camera options, but another security system supplier also delivered video straight to Macs.

“The iPhone is the most elegant smartphone available, therefore a mount should never get in the way of showcasing the design,” said Gerhard Mayr, VP of worldwide mobile phones & new markets. The mount is designed to fix to the windshield to reduce driver distraction and position the iPhone for optimal GPS signal. Directions, whether they’re just Maps or a GPS app, drive down the battery in a hurry, so the included car charger and the five foot connection cable make sure the iPhone battery doesn’t drain. The kit is now available for the iPhone 3G/S and 4, and sells for $49.99 with free shipping — with an introductory price of $44.99 until Feb 3, from www.bringmobi.com.

The company says Navigon MobileNavigator is the first universal navigation app from a major GPS company (it’s been in business since 1991) that runs natively on the iPhone and the iPad. Users with MobileNavigator installed can use the app on both devices without extra charges. It utilizes the iPad’s large display and user interface with a higher resolution, and new menus. Route planning shows a scrollable, multi-touch map to select destinations in simple taps. Users can plan routes at home on the iPad and then send them to their iPhone for navigation on the go.

Navigon is located at booth 943 At Macworld Expo, where there’s free stuff in a contest. The company will give away 30 licenses for the award winning MobileNavigator app via a Twitter wall. Include a defined hashtag (#) (revealed at the booth) in a tweet. Winners are announced each day at 4pm on Twitter.

At the NAVIGON booth, attendees can also check out the NAVIGON help2park app, the first in a series of free single-feature apps for the iPhone that NAVIGON will release throughout 2011, marking the company’s 20th anniversary. help2park assists drivers with finding a parking spot nearby. A clean and easy to use interface helps to find parking options within a defined area – including addresses and distances from the current location. If NAVIGON’s MobileNavigator is installed on the iPhone, drivers are guided directly to the parking space of choice.

MobileNavigator 1.7.0 is compatible with iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G and iPad 3G. The app also runs on first generation iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad WLAN, but third party accessories for GPS reception are required for these devices. iOS4 multitasking is supported by the iPhone 4 and 3GS only. For more information visit www.navigon.com/iphone.

Apple is a pretty consistent and rational company, said Macworld’s chief editor Jason Snell. Despite legends like the Reality Distortion Field that has surrounded the company’s product activities here in San Francisco over the last quarter-century of Januarys, there are fundamental rules to guide a customer in understanding what’s coming next — and maybe more to the point, why Apple kills and creates the way it has for the last 15 years.

Snell focused on the period since 1996 because that’s the Steve Jobs era, the time when he returned to the company he founded and molded it with his image. The less said about the Apple of pre-’96, the firm that made the Newton and a raft of mistakes, the better. Comparisons to that Apple without Jobs and today’s company are ill advised.

Rather than viewing the Apple of this year, sans Steve, as an echo of that John Sculley-Gilbert Amelio mess, the 2011 Apple is a company that even without Jobs on the campus runs in his image. He’s not a cult leader, “but a man who has created a strong corporate culture.” Snell went so far as to describe Jobs not as Apple’s MVP, but more like a Michael Jordan,” leading a hand-picked team.

The rules in Snell’s rundown felt simple and familiar for How Apple Does It.

1. Build technology so you can control your destiny: the Safari browser.
2. Release no feature that isn’t perfect: the user interface of the iPhone, long after the world was littered with cell phones.
3. Let design lead you in creating products (see below).
4. Make engineering serve the needs of design: simple to use products are harder to engineer, but that’s success for you, the customer.
5. It’s better to get rid of a feature too early, than too late: floppy drives on the first iMacs, or Firewire ports on laptops.
6. Timing can be everything; don’t release before a product’s technology and its market is ready.
7. All products need showmanship as part of their release, whether it’s an industry event like last year’s iPad rollout or the ongoing push from Apple retail stores.

Snell admitted that summing up Apple in a 20-minute talk was daunting. But the details he chose to prove the rules above rang true. He showed a photo of thee Rio MP3 music player, released in 2000. the iPod arrived and blew away the Rio, because it had storage enough for thousands of songs, not the album-full of the Rio’s. The technology was timed right.

Apple is driven by design and not engineeering as a philosophy, Snell said, and that’s no dig at the company’s technical chops. Design is also a place where the company gets misunderstood most often.

“Design isn’t about making it look pretty; that’s one of the fatal mistakes its competitors make,” Snell said. “Most products are bad, and the reason they’re bad is that the more complex a product is to make, the more you have to rely on very technical people focused on details — who are trained to build very technical products. They make decisions based on their world, rather than the user’s world. Apple’s corporate philosophy is to design a product, and challenge their engineers to create the product that the users want.”