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.

The knock on e-books, if there is one, is that an online manual makes it less easy to browse. That used to be true before readers like the Kindle or the iPad. By now it’s just a memory, so long as the publisher can give you the e-book format you need.

O’Reilly is thorough about this selection. You purchase an e-book and get download rights to the .mobi, PDF, Android and ePub versions of your book. Two of these can be viewed on an iPad, and the PDF is viewable anywhere.

My problem needed an iPhone “restore to factory settings” solution. I take a deep breath when I do something like reset any device. You worry about losing your contacts for the iPhone, or apps you may have purchased, even things like the Marketplace podcasts or my favorite, On the Media. Nobody wants to reorder or reload such stuff.

Guess what word does not appear in the iPhone Missing Manual index? Yes, it’s “restore.” You can track it down under “resetting,” which leads you to saying aloud, “page 375″ while you turn to the page and start scanning it.

This whole process is so direct with an e-book. You type “restore” in the e-book viewer of your choice — Preview or Adobe Reader on the Mac, iBooks on the iPad or the ultra-fine PDF Reader Pro ($3.99), or GoodReader on the iPhone (99 cents) — and all those references pop up.

So I learned that a restore is not as scary as it might seem, because even if your iPhone has been acting up awhile — and backing up troubled files — you can go to the location of your last good backup and replace it with what iTunes offers you as a backup.

(If you’re wondering, those backups live in the user/library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder. So you just go to your daily or weekly backups from Time Machine, because you back up every day, and swap in a clean backup. Before you restore.)

Although I love paper and the browsing of it, I find it harder than ever to justify a purchase of a training book (that’s what I call manuals) that takes up space on my sagging shelves or cherrywood desk. Pogue’s iPhone book is a great resource, complete and written so even a beginner to the Apple product can extend the phone’s use as a mobile computer.

This third edition is the latest, having been printed right as Apple brought out the 3GS phones last summer. Until the rumored 4G phones emerge this year, it’s the best you can buy for a complete lesson on the iPhone’s power.

I just don’t know if I need to make any more space for the paper here at HQ anymore. At least not if the publisher keeps offering e-books at discounts. O’Reilly even has a print+e-book offer at its own store. And the e-book versions are not sold at Amazon.

Today I bought a CSS Missing Manual (for WordPress blog designs) and the Photoshop CS4 Missing Manual, both as e-books. Total cost under $34. They’d be twice that as paper books. Get your discount before tonight and help out the Earth and reduce your recycling load.

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.

Indexing and searching a Zinio iPad version of a publication is still in the future for this app. There are many clickable links strewn on pages of magazines such as MacWorld, Popular Science or Smart Money. Most publications offer a complete table of contents with links you can touch to jump to an article. But knowing where to go to find, say, the latest on Health Savings Accounts for your employees, is a matter for a smarter interface than the ease of the iPad. You can do a simple search online at the Zinio Web site, but alas: Flash is required to view and preview pubs through the Zinio Web interface. Searching via the Zinio Web site delivers shopping links to content that you can’t read on the iPad yet, although this is plainly marked — and you can fire up the MacBook to read nearly every magazine in the joint. Flash is lurking, though, in the Web interface.

The multi-touch interface, however, can go places that no browser will travel right now. Turning the iPad to a portrait aspect will show off a single page to fill the screen. Turning the iPad to landscape mode gives you a spread, to enjoy the complete layout — graphics which magazines still do better than any other medium. You can zoom and pull the pages as needed in either aspect. Touch the screen and the spreads appear below in page order, including the ad spreads.

Yes, the Zinio versions of publications include the advertising, and always have, even before the iPad app was released. Ads still bolster most of the publication world, with rare exceptions such as Consumer Reports. You can flip right past them as if they were on paper, although in the iPad version the ads contain touchable links that carry you to an advertiser’s Web site, if you wanted to do more research on say, Web hosting.

It’s easy enough to capture a file that you could transfer into a presentation: simply use the iPad’s built-in screen grabber, by holding down the home button and clicking the shutter with the on-off button. Once you plug the iPad into your Mac, the pictures pop up in iPhoto, where you can export the snapped pages using that application’s tools.

Even better is an e-mail feature that lets a subscriber share an article with a colleague. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many articles you could forward to your staff. Clicking on the e-mail message of the text pops up the iPad’s keyboard, so you can annotate with your own message or edit the article down to the salient point you’re passing along.

Overall, I was hooked on using Zinio’s app to consume publications. It’s a genuine test of the readability virtues of the iPad, and a way to read in the dark when you wake early in the morning and want to start your day with some news-gathering. You can download the free Zinio app in the App Store and enjoy a few free pubs to decide if this interface is right for you. I’m glad to have access to information that doesn’t involve storing what I’ve read somewhere around the office, or recycling. Zinio is pushing the publication experience into a new place with the iPad: a mobile library that sacrifices none of the attraction of reading while it extends your ability to share information.

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.

Any magazines you can buy from Zinio.com today and through the iPhone — all but Apple’s restricted adult content titles — can be bought and read on the iPad at launch, Mullen promised. A Zinio version of a magazine enjoys special navigation through a table of contents page. All Zinio titles can tie a reader closely to online content through active Web links. And the most amazing part of the Zinio offering? Apple hasn’t insisted on a way to collect any part of the subscription fees that Zinio’s publishers charge for issues or year-long subs.

As of late Friday before the iPad’s launch, the Zinio app for iPhone was the only download available from Apple’s App Store iPad section. But Mullen was confident that the company, which distributes some of the better-known titles in the magazine world, has permission to act as a newsstand. Zinio is already selling magazines through the iPhone, after all. By moving away from Flash, it’s shedding a light on new display technology. leading publishers away from Flash, admittedly hearing some grumbling, is going to be another force for change in the way graphic content — live and interactive — is presented. Flash is becoming a second option alongside the HTML 5 format that Apple wants to succeed.

“We redesigned the Zinio Web site for a shopping experience on the iPad,” she said. The magazine readers shop for titles outside of iTunes, and Zinio redesigned its readers for all magazines so it drops Flash. A good deal of the debate over the iPad’s chances to be an information hub surrounded the lack of Flash support. Zinio is following two paths: eliminating Flash and providing the publishers’ design teams with a Zinio software kit to create iPad-ready interactive content.

“It will help publishers understand exactly what they need to share with their media buyers, planners, ad agencies and their creative teams so they can start to design and include audio and video for a non-Flash environment.”

Magazine purchases through Zinio are handled via credit card in local currency. The company claims to have 80 percent of the consumer magazine titles available in its newsstand. Magazines are not mentioned in any of Apple’s iBook details, so perhaps Zinio will get the head start on selling some of the best-designed visuals and compelling writing available from traditional publishers. It also looks like those publishers will now have a guide to help them along the path to making research through a magazine an experience closer to TV, a movie or even a video game with interactivity. All this transfomation will take is a publisher’s touch, and the touch of hundreds of thousand of fingers.

Bento arrived in the Filemaker stable when the company realized that its flagship product might not fit for small customers. We’ve used Filemaker for our publishing company since 1995, but Filemaker 10 is more database than some people need. Bento takes care of that complexity without sacrificing essentials and the Mac’s trademark ease of use.

Bento 3 connects database entries with iPhoto’s libraries. If your business is image-based in any way — photography, video, even inventory items you’ve tracked with visuals — this will be a fresh asset in tracking business.

What’s new is summarized on the Bento Web site, but a Grid View is one of the more useful image-based improvements. You will need to be up to date on your OS X version — it doesn’t work with anything older than Leopard 10.5.7 or Snow Leopard 10.6.1.Current users of Bento can upgrade for $29, and if you need multiple copies of the product you can order what Filemaker calls a Family Pack: Up to five users working at the same address for $99. Remarkably, Bento 3 allows up to five users on the same network to share the same database at once — a capability that was once reserved for the full Filemaker software.

The iPod Nano could become a key business tool for creative pros and writers on the road. The device comes with a voice recording app, a built-in mic and a video camera. “We want to get in on this [Flip] market,” Jobs said after a standing ovation and more than 45 minutes of other product rollouts.

Jobs thanked the Apple community for its well wishes during his battle with liver disease that culminated in a transplant. “I’ve got the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash,” he said in opening remarks at the event, “and was generous enough to donate their organs. I wouldn’t be here without such generosity.” After urging the audience to become organ donors, Jobs said “I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple, and I’m loving every day of it.”

Mobile devices led the pack of announcements, although no new iPhone models made a debut. Apple put its new 3GS units into the market in June. Jobs said that 30 million of the phones have been sold since Apple introduced the game-changer about two years ago. But a near-cousin to the iPhone, the iPod Touch, got a nudge in Apple’s targeting that makes the Touch look like Apple’s answer to netbooks from PC makers. The Touch, however, received little in the way of improvements except a new $199 price point and more storage in larger models.

The Touch has become Apple’s stealth entry into the netbook arena by virtue of its size, Apple’s VP of Marketing Paul Schiller said. The media event flashed a shot of a Dell netbook hanging out of a back pocket as a poke at PC netbook solutions. The wi-fi features are key to making the Touch a $200 portable computer with a screen a little larger than a business card.

But you touch the Touch to deliver its goods, just like the iPhone, and most apps built for iPhone work on the Touch. Apple rolls out a 3.1 version of the software that drives the iPhone and Touch today, free as an iPhone upgrade and a $4.95 lift for Touch users who’ve bought the 3.0 release. Apple says accounting rules force it to charge Touch users for the updates, since those devices have no mandated data plan like iPhones.

A 64GB Touch costs $399, the price for just one-fourth of that storage 18 months ago. A 32GB model is $299 and the entry-level unit is 8GB at $199. More notable: the new iPod Nano, which includes a video camera, an FM radio and a pedometer in addition to the microphone. Recordings can be synced with iTunes or up to a YouTube account, although not through wi-fi.

Apple has segregated its recording features away from the Touch, giving full photo, audio and video to the iPhone and adding audio and video to the Nano. Meanwhile, the net connections of wi-fi aren’t available on the Nano. It’s a strategy that Apple hopes will push business toward the 4GB Nano, which is priced at $149.

Speculation before the event ran to rumors of a camera on the Touch. One guess proved correct, as Apple added album liner notes, videos and lyrics as options for buying music from the iTunes Store. A new iTunes 9 is available as a free download today, supporting better sync options for devices and the added album features, among other entertainment upgrades.

Business users can overlook the power of pictures. The Web has become a high-value marketplace with social networks and blogs. Every one of these sites — Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, even free blogs on Blogger — is a marketing tool. And these messages from businesses stand out when they have a graphic element.

You could start with your own picture, and Pogue’s book begins with taking photos. He’s got a clear and illustrated 13-page Taking the Shot section right up front that answers questions of how to frame and shoot. This is all subjective, of course, but adding things like The Rule Guideline of Thirds shows flexibility. And Pogue has his own artistic sensibility, since he was a Broadway musical conductor in a prior career.

The book also covers 10 Decisions to make on camera options, like flash, manual mode, how much exposure. I’ve been taking photos for more than 25 years as a journalist, and Pogue’s advice refreshed me. Every enterprise has access to easier photography tools today. The basics are in this book, but it adds so much more in details, too.From a fun section on camera-buying tips, the book moves through the photography skills and into The Lab, where camera meets computer. Picasa and iPhoto are the primary programs he details, giving both PC and Mac users a chance to learn about free software available online — or in the case of the Mac, right on your computer in iPhoto.

His advice only goes as far as iPhoto 8 in this book, printed in January of ’09. Apple didn’t make iPhoto 9 available until February of this year, but the iPhoto lessons in the book will keep everybody busy. iPhoto has become a deep, rich application. This book lets you dig in for advanced tips, as well as explanations about where photo files go to live and how to get others into the app.

There’s colorful illustrations throughout, really helpful when the book gets into Fixing Photos (straighten, sharpen, fix exposure). You can even learn about saturation and how it can make a picture more vivid.

Best of all, maybe, is the section called The Audience. Editing and shooting may be easier to grasp, because these photo tasks have been around for years. Sharing your photos with the world, like onto that blog on in a Facebook album, is a new option — and probably the most important one to getting more than a fun payoff for your pictures. A 12-page section on Publishing Photos on the Web explains how to get your camera skills working to impress the world.

Being a Missing Manual, the book has a healthy 10-page index and a couple of appendixes, plus lots of links to helpful Web sites. I’ve been in publishing long enough to remember darkroom work and slides. Neither is a part of a modern photo experience, but I wish something like this could be in every business bookcase. We’d have a better picture from the working world. You can, too.

David Pogue’s Digital Photography: The Missing Manual
January 2009, 304 Pages
Series: The Missing Manuals
Retail $24.95; Amazon.com $16.49