The iPad alternatives are a-comin’ this spring, or so we are promised in a bit of web advertising from this vendor and that. The wanna-be’s of mobile desktops range far and wide in price, availability and size. But none of them can top the cheeky sass of Toshiba. The maker of DVD players and Windows laptops wants an iPad user to switch, sending a special nyah-nyah from its website.

When an iPad user arrives at the web page that teases about Toshiba’s tablet, you get greeted by the screen to the left, which is force-fed to you as the website determines you’re an iPad user. Mind you, Toshiba could have served up even more useful information in its we-haven’t-shipped message: Something like an exact date of release, or crucial data such as weight of their Tablet. Or its price. On and on it goes with the competitors to the best mobile computer Apple ever released. They want to remind you that you’re not part of the largest group of web users: the ones that have to swallow the battery-sucking, horsepower-choking Flash.

It’s quite the ad ploy, but Toshiba’s device managers must be hedging their bets, because Daring Fireball reported that lopping off the apple.html on the web page directs you to an HTML 5 page where its snappy movie runs fine. Runs even more apparently than the tablet, which doesn’t even have a video demo on the web. (Toshiba’s reading Daring Fireball, because less than a day after the HTML 5 trick was posted, Toshiba killed off access to everything that didn’t use the “apple.html” on the web page address. Odd though: apparently Toshiba doesn’t own the name to its product on the web; head to toshibatablet.com to see it’s got nothing to do with mobile computing. More confusing is that Toshiba sold what it called a tablet for months already: the Portege Tablet, all last year at about $1,700, because that sparkler was a Windows PC with a touchscreen interface.

What to buy for a tablet this year? You could wait to see what’s on sale by the time these Android-powered tablets finally clear company tests and go into the market. By that late date, though, Apple will have an iPad 2 ready for you to purchase, a device that now has more than 30,000 apps written for it. Even though it won’t have all those blessed ports (USB, microSD, video output, thick toast), the iPad 2 will be available to everybody on Day One (no shortages this time; Apple’s put in a massive component order and is building the devices now) and we know it will be under $600, somehow. Those two features, availability and value, are likely to be hard to beat by a wave of smarty-pants vendors hooking up with Android.

On that best-mobile-ever claim above: You can use an iPad (model 1) as your travel laptop even today. Starting Wednesday I’ll be posting news and photos using nothing more than my iPad, the 16GB no wi-fi model, a Kensington Bluetooth keyboard and case, and an iPhone for my camera. You’ll be able to read the reports from Macworld Expo — a show just crawling with tablet apps like the new DK Publishing travel guides to major cities, or the Mobile Office Suite that lets you edit PowerPoint presentations. See, while everybody with an iPad is likely to have another computer to watch that sassy Toshiba teaser ad, few of the Toshiba tablet buyers will have 30,000 apps to make their tablets useful. Not this year, or even by this time next year.

One great reason to make the trip to Macworld is to buy off the show floor at discount pricing. Really useful planning tools OmniFocus and OmniGraffle came back to Bites HQ nearly half-off last year.

This year for the first time, the Expo organizers are previewing the show floor specials. It does good for the vendors hoping to sell from the floor, as well as generate Expo attendees for the conference.

Have a look at what’s previewed as of today (Jan. 18) and adjust your purchasing budget accordingly.

Through tomorrow, Jan. 17, the MacTech Boot Camp conference is offering $100 discount on its deep-tech training for the Mac and Apple’s mobile solutions, iPhone and iPad. That cuts the nine hours of classes to $395, including lunch and break snacks.

The event is aimed at the Apple product user who needs to do maintenance and configuration and management of their own systems. There’s a good business case to be made for learning this stuff, and a classroom setting works well for some kinds of employees or your staff.

MacTech organizer Neal Ticktin offers this summary of the event that takes place in the same week as this month’s Macworld Expo conference in San Francisco; Wed. Jan 26th, 9am-6pm, at the Parc 55 Hotel.  (Badge pickup opens at 8am, while the Macworld event begins in earnest on Jan. 27.) Registration is discounted from the MacTech website, where you register and pay.

Who should attend? Those that already support the home, SOHO (small office home office) and SMB (small to medium business) communities, or that want to become a consultant supporting these areas.

Those interested in becoming Apple Certified can take part in a study session and exam the day prior, Jan. 25.
Read the rest of this entry »

A two for one sale that ends today leads a list of discounted products and services that might make nice gifts for the Apple product user heading into business in 2011. Filemaker has a sale on its flagship Filemaker 11 database that includes a second copy free along with a purchased license.

The database is a genuine value at its list price, and so an extraordinary asset at half-off. Businesses which share contacts and relationships might help one another with this Filemaker deal. It expires on December 22. Details are at the Filemaker website, which lets users obtain a second license code for another business to use.

• Macworld is offering $50 off the Conference Package of your choice, or $25 off a 1-Day Users Conference pass. Discounts expire on Dec. 26. Registration is at the site for Macworld 2011, which runs Jan. 26-29.

• A $14.99 price for the Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad is available until Dec. 31. The latest version of the suite to create, edit, and share Microsoft Word and Excel files, and view PowerPoint files adds support for iOS 4.2, multi-tasking, access to Huddle and SugarSync, and external keyboard support. Discounts available at the site.

• Appigo is running a 99-cent sale on its iPad and iPhone apps through January 1. The price is a significant discount off the $4.99 price to ToDo for the iPad, an extensive tool that’s ideal for a mobile business pro tracking projects and tasks. There’s also a Notebook, AccuFuel and Corkulous app on sale, along with an iPhone version of Todo.

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.

There are millions of users of Intuit’s QuickBooks, and for the smaller business that’s a fine choice for accounting and finance on the Mac. But a larger company, or one with business-specific needs, would do well to look at software like Connected Enterprise from Accountek.

At the latest MacWorld Expo, the company was displaying a new inventory lot control solution for Mac-based businesses. A modest little kiosk, one developer/representative, and a lot of functionality in demonstrations on the floor. In a release for Accountek 6, company officials explained

Lot control is necessary in many industries and where detailed part identification information must be tracked in the event of a product recall.  Having a lot control system allows a company to completely track all parts received and shipped by their lot numbers.  The changes in Connected make it very easy to track and pick specific parts throughout purchasing and sales process.

Connected’s lot control allows a business to:

• Simplify the process of tracking parts throughout production.
• Meet the needs of your industry when lot tracking is a requirement for product recalls.
• Identify specific lots received by purchase order and pick and ship specific lots on customer orders.
• Build products and create your own lot number and expiration dates.

If you’ve got no idea what a lot is, as it relates to inventory, you can move on. But Accountek understands financials in a way that corporations use to communicate with each other. It’s assuring to know that even if the solution starts at around $5,000, there’s business-class accounting available that lets you soar above the muddied plains of QuickBooks.

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.

One of the busiest booths at last week’s Macworld 2010 Expo was one staffed by a 500-year-old company, showing a sparkling-new product. Papershow makes a presentation interactive over the Web or inside a meeting room. It relies on the magic of Papershow paper, a frame of microscopic points, almost invisible to the naked eye, which work as locators when a special pen moves across the sheet.

The software, pen and paper integrate with JPEG and PowerPoint files, so that slick slide deck you created to dazzle in the boardroom or in a pitch to a client gets a fresh angle. Canson, a French company that started selling paper in the 16th Century, unveiled the product for the Mac at the show, after selling Papershow during 2009 for the PC. It’s a $200 solution that was competing, sort of, with the likes of the massive $4,000 electronic whiteboard in the booth right next door.

The full solution includes a pen with a micro camera, Bluetooth transcorder and a processor on-board; the magic paper both in printable sheets (to put your slides in front of you to annotate) and in a notepad format; and a USB key of 256MB to plug into your Mac and receive the pen’s transmissions. Your presentation’s audience doesn’t even have to be in the room — if you’re able to share your screen over the Web, your marks and notes become part of your show in remote offices.

In front of a crowd still buzzing after a day and a half of expo time, Chason’s rep showed the ability to underline, circle or make a note on top of a PowerPoint slide, in multiple colors. The product makes a presentation more alive than the stock animations from PowerPoint. Once it imports a PowerPoint file for annotation, it can save the resulting markup back to PPT or JPEG formats, or Papershow’s native format.

Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was. Read the rest of this entry »