PowerPoint slides in SlideShark

Brainshark will use Macworld to introduce a new workgroup version of its SlideShark app for the iPad. The company says the software has begun to solve the problem of PowerPoint’s incompatibility on the iPad. There’s 30 million PowerPoint decks created every day, according to the company.

SlideShark has been selling since October, and the company says its been downloaded twice a minute since then. A version that will launch in early February adds functionality to support teams and groups within organizations. The current version is geared more toward individuals.

“Prior to SlideShark’s launch last October, millions of iPad users who wanted to view and show PowerPoint slide decks on their device had only spotty, unreliable options,” the company said in a release. The existing software on the iPad market flattens presentations into PDFs at worst. Or the competition’s conversion techniques render animations inactive, sometimes distorting fonts, colors, images and more. We can attest to the last outcome. While we don’t animate with PowerPoint, those slides check into iPad apps of today and don’t check out the same.

Doxie Go, a new cordless scanner that scans without a computer, has been upgraded with Doxie 2.1, delivering ABBYY FineReader Optical Character Recognition.

With the latest software, Doxie Go users can sync scans then create searchable PDFs in black and white or color, all without leaving the Doxie software. Searchable PDFs can be searched or used locally, or pushed into the cloud for instant sharing.

The $199 product works with Windows as well as Macs. Doxie 2.1 is a free software upgrade to all existing Doxie Go owners. With an optional sync accessory, it can work with the iPhone & iPad.

Small business users can employ the new FiledRight Document Management system for Mac from Mindwrap, announced at Macworld this week. The company says the software is designed specifically for Macintosh-based small business users. After 24 years of experience in the imaging and document management marketplace Mindwrap is bringing integrated scanning and batch processing capabilities to the product offered in user license bundles of 5, 10, and 25 users including a FiledRight server, a client workstation, indexing and query screens for common business needs, administration tools, and a scanner driver

FiledRight is being sold this week at a starting special price of $1,999. It employs the popular open source FireBird database for indexing, searching, and management of all types of scanned and desktop office documents. Like a lot of larger-company solutions, an annual support contract is being offered as an extra expense.

Jim Small, Mindwrap’s president, said the Mac’s support for PDF and images makes it a natural platform choice for document management.  FiledRight is an integrated, turnkey solution, a package that’s usually faster to deploy than toolkits that can require extensive development.

Installation and configuration are quick and easy with the included server administration tools, allowing managers to select and deploy application-specific indexing screens and assign role-based permissions to all users. Scanning can be enabled for any FiledRight native Mac workstation with the addition of a scanner driver. Clients can quickly convert paper to multipage PDF and TIFF using Fujitsu scanners. They can also perform page-level editing and redaction of sensitive documents. FiledRight maintains historical versions of all edited documents.

After almost a year on the market, it’s time to look at whether an iPad can be desktop replacement. If it can’t today, Apple may have another answer to the question, “How can I make my carry-on lighter and smaller?”

I took only my iPad on a couple of business trips this winter, and it served well. Most airports require you to take the iPad out of the carry-on, despite what you may have heard. It has writing and editing tools, the ability to connect to mail and social networks, and bare-bones blog posting and editing tools. I didn’t being along an Apple Camera Connector to hook up my point-and-shoot Canon to the iPad; that would have helped. Instead, I pushed my iPhone camera photos though the web to my mailbox, then pulled them onto the iPad. On that last element, I wished for a nice MacBook Air.

The Air only weighs a pound more than the iPad and takes up just two extra inches in length. What the Air does not have is a multi-touch interface. You can get hooked on that.
What’s more, many of the best apps on the iPad just don’t have a desktop equivalent. Now that there’s an iMovie and GarageBand written for the iPad, there’s a chance for a real iPhoto there. But there’s already plenty of photo editing tools, good ones, on sale for the iPad.

I took along my Kensington Bluetooth Keyfolio (above) on the trip, but that’s become a bit of a disappointment. Between the Keyfolio’s jumpy key repetition, and the ever-vigilant auto-correct on the iPad, it’s actually a bit faster for me to use the onscreen keyboard. It becomes easier to do so if you turn on clicks in the Settings for the keyboard.

Zagg has a nice keyboard and metal case combo, but you still must expose the back of the iPad in that arrangement. Both the Kensington and the Zagg have physical keys, but the Zagg doesn’t use the rubberized keys of the Kensington. I tried out the Zagg at Macworld Expo, and it types faster than anything.

But the recent introduction of Thunderbolt, with its display-plus-disk or printer connections, promises another kind of faster future for mobile computing. This is a category that includes a technology which Apple is not using yet — but there’s still another mobile computer where Apple could use the upcoming Wireless USB. Read the rest of this entry »

Business cards may seem like a throwback to a simpler time, but they’re still in high use today. I carted a sheaf of them to Macworld Expo recently and came back with a fistful of new ones to integrate. WorldCard Mobile from Penpower — which gave me a $5.99 copy of its app to evaluate — makes card entry and organization painless.

It’s a little bit of a miracle for this old dog to point my iPhone at a card, snap a picture and then have it Recognize the card and its fields, and slip them into my Contacts app. Often this happened without a shred of extra work on my part. Sometimes I had to make an edit or two. I even had an arty business card that used a very stylized “A” in the middle of the contact’s name. WorldCard Mobile never blinked at the challenge. Mary got her first name plugged in automatically.

There’s features to share cards and contacts over email, and the app files its own “stack” of cards. It also stores the original photo of the card for reference. A very useful feature gives you the ability to take an email signature block and recognize it into the WorldCard database. There’s more editing needed on a signature block than a card, but it saves a lot of work of cutting and pasting, old-style.

There are not a lot of features in World Card Mobile. That decision follows classic app design, to do something really well and not gunk up the rest of the app. At $5.99 it will pay for itself within the first hour you use it on business cards. You gotta figure it will work with the new iPad 2, which will include the product’s first back-facing camera.

Highly recommended. There’s no end in sight to the business card. But using an iPhone or iPad with WorldCard Mobile to put these into a database is a nice upgrade to the old card scanner + software solutions. This is also a great example of how an app for iPhone can beat any desktop Mac application, just by focusing on one good thing.

Downloading The Daily news took about 3 minutes

The iPad is counting Day One of The Daily, the first everyday newspaper created for the iPad and iOS. A massive download of the free app, plus three minutes of downloading each issue a day (on demand) gives you plenty to talk about with clients on visits: News, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps and Games, and Sports (sections of the paper)

Of note: No specific business section. The publishers, after all, also own The Wall Street Journal, which has its own app and subscription needs. The Daily is produced by the biggest news organization on Earth, News Corp. Not a peep yet about whether the app is headed for the Android tablets, as well. If that happens, it may offer a metric to measure popularity — how well will this first tablet-only newspaper do in these two markets.

There’s photos to view and video to play inside the stories of The Daily, up to 100 articles worth of coverage per day. In this app release, The Daily joins the ranks of Zinio, which for almost a year has been a digital newsstand for iPad and iPhone and Mac owners, selling weekly and monthly publications like The Economist or Smart Money. Zinio has been previewed a slick new version of its app, set to release around the time the new iPads start shipping. Both Zinio and The Daily provide social network sharing of articles, as well as pushing copy via email. Great for researching for staff projects.

The Daily is a grand experiment in stalling the decline of the newspaper. Big metro dailies, which may have given you something to chat up with local clients during your coffee-shop meetings, have seen circulation dive. The LA Times is reported to have gone from 1 million subscribers to 600,000 on daily issues over the last few years.

There are other ways of getting iPad-ready news, for research as well as social sharing. Zinio’s got multiple-platform ability: Macs and PCs, as well as phones. And the New York cousin of the Times is pushing software that delivers papers to anything that can run Adobe Air — which eliminates the iPad and iPhone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lean Steve leads into iPhoto

You must use Safari, apparently, but it’s been place online at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/event/index.html. Tim Cook, Apple COO, announced that the Mac installed base is now 50 million users, and the Mac has outgrown the market for 18 quarters in a row. Apple’s Mac business — not the mobile iOS units — is already $22 billion a year. Apple claims to have a 20 percent consumer market share for PCs.

The first 10 minutes of this event provides accurate ammunition to prove that the Mac tent is getting large enough to justify a switch away from Windows. “Whether you look at the products, or the numbers, or the products behind the numbers, the momentum has never been higher,” Cook said.

New themes for slide shows

Then comes the new iLife demos, starting with iPhoto. Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of Marketing, is showing off “Full-Screen” interfaces for the app. iPhoto now makes slideshows automatically, an aspect that can be used for marketing presentations in lieu of the everyday PowerPoint decks.

There’s also an extended look at the new, more powerful editing features in iMovie. It’s hard to describe how much this program has improved over the last two years. The trailers shown look Hollywood-caliber, using included music and effects. Frankly, iMovie became an embarrassment about three years ago, but Apple has rescued it and driven its capabilities much closer to Final Cut Express.

As always, during a major Apple event, the company’s online store was taken offline so the new products can be unveiled for sale afterward.

Over the first 30 minutes of the Apple event, the brief on the Mac business state and the two most visual iLife apps dominated  the stage. iMovie has credits now, storyboards, themes to speed up editing. If you’re using a Mac to create marketing materials, these are marked upgrades to the apps which Apple ships for free with new systems.

Which might be the point here — selling the new systems over a holiday season is going to be easier with this included software’s new features. Apple will be selling the iLife ’11 package for existing Mac users, too. In a real upgrade to the value of these apps, existing users of iLife won’t have to re-purchase the product as we have in the past. There’s a $49 upgrade. Previous versions sold for $79.

There’s no update at all for iWeb and iDVD that is worthy of a demo in the conference. The former never had the simple-build ability for websites in its early releases, and later updates came after the blogging habit replaced a lot of websites with WordPress blogs. iDVD works well enough to burn movies built in iMovie, but the latter’s enhancements seem to have frozen any improvements on iDVD.

GarageBand got a nice demonstration that shows massive editing improvements for the tool we use to create podcasts, one of the most cost-effective marketing and customer-outreach tools. The Mac’s included software make it dead-simple to build podcasts with GarageBand. The fact that a six member band can better mix its music is nice for your off-hours, unless your business is producing music.

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 »

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 »

Zinio means to make a big impression by the iPad’s opening weekend. The company has been selling magazines (single-copy and subscriptions) for 10 years online and on computers, admittedly “before the market’s time” according to CEO Jeanniey Mullen. But fast-forward from the time of Windows XP to the Apple touchstone that boots up on a quarter-million laps this weekend, and you can see the numbers rising for publishers and their readers.

Zinio will offer 2,000 issues for purchase (and another 400 back issues) through its free app, something the company designed as soon as Apple released the iPad’s software development kit. The company knew that a digital reader with full motion and interactive hooks would be a lure to readers who expect more from a publication than just words and static pictures. As of Thursday the company wasn’t sure if it would make the initial April 3 iPad app rollout lineup that Apple controls, but the CEO was certain that Zinio was going to deliver business magazines like Smart Money (from the Wall Street Journal) MacWorld, Kiplinger’s, US News & World Report — even Oprah, Yoga Journal and Esquire. All will enjoy the full-screen experience of the new Apple tablet, she said.

The Zinio catalog has been available for reading on iPhone as well as the Mac and PCs, but the Mac version runs on Adobe’s Air platform. Zinio has been working on removing such technology that doesn’t run on the iPad, substituting HTML5 and XML.

“We started to look for opportunities to optimize our iPhone app for the iPad, and have been feverishly de-Flashing our [magazine] files and our reader,” Mullen said. “We’ve been rebuilding our infrastructure to support the non-Flash environment.”

Small business owners won’t see many focused titles that have been optimized for the iPad’s features this weekend other than MacWorld. But Car and Driver, Dwell, National Geographic, Sporting News Daily, Spin and Zinio’s own Viv magazine are coming online first with video features and slide shows that take a reader beyond a magazine’s traditional graphics and text. It’s going to add a new dimension to showing off a publication’s article during a presentation. Publishers will have the chance to create animated, interactive graphics that might bridge the gap towards a need for skills in Keynote, Apple’s presentation app. Read the rest of this entry »