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.

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.

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.

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.

USB wireless technology shows great promise. I sure would like to have 480mbs connectivity to a few devices in my office. Of course, none of these devices have any wireless capability today. Replacing the printers will be cheap. Not so much the big disks. I don’t know if anyone intends for wireless USB to serve monitors. That’s the real magic of Thunderbolt.

But this wireless aspect is more important to the people who want to use a tablet, or an Atrix-like smartphone that can be mounted on a desktop. Intel might get behind wireless USB — but it won’t, since it’s got a big adopter for Thunderbolt’s desktop connectivity in Apple.

Apple’s got its own wireless connection to printers in AirPrint, but it won’t be able to get much traction from print makers for that tech for awhile. In a bit of irony it’s HP, which is selling an iPad competitor this year, who is the earliest adopter of AirPrint. If HP adopts AirPrint across its printer lines, it matters a lot less what Epson or Canon or Lexmark do for AirPrint.

I expect the HP TouchPad to have some kind of wireless connection to peripherals. Maybe wireless USB, if it’s ready for prime time. That would be a big advantage once the peripheral companies become wireless USB-aware.

Me, I wonder how good all of these wireless desktop replacements will really become, how possible it will become to use them for productivity, and not just consumption. That all comes down to apps making it possible. You know who’s got the biggest lead on mobile apps. InfoWorld has an article on this idea of making iPads or the Motorola Atrix replacements for desktops.

Does any laptop count as a desktop? It does for more people than ever these days, if they have enough horsepower in the laptop. And the Air has only one peripheral connection, a single USB 2.0 port. It could use wireless USB, if the technology allows for multiple peripherals.

Maybe Apple just puts wireless USB into this fall’s version of the MacBook Air. That would get me to buy one. Perhaps not before we purchase an iPad 2. It’s fun to have so many choices.

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.

In contrast, the New York Times online venture is the subscriber-based Times Reader, since the NYT pay-wall is going up on the website very soon. Said Reader is powered by Adobe Air, so it’s a Linux-Mac-Windows laptop-desk app. Except that you will need to install Air, another of the things Flashy things Apple is leaving off its new MacBooks. Windows laptops don’t ship with Air installed, but they’ve got a recent vintage of Adobe’s Flash on their disk.

iPad owners can’t complain about the biggest news company in the world adopting the iPad, even if News Corp does run the shrill Fox News cable channel. There’s room for everybody’s opinions. The most interesting section of The Daily may be Gossip. Nobody does the dish like British tabloids — papers run by owner Rupert Murdoch, onstage at today’s intro of  The Daily. Unlike his Fox News chieftain Roger Ailes, Murdoch’s beliefs may influence the print/tablets products more than broadcast. (WSJ, however, is a bastion of business-first creeds. And so was born Fox Business News for TV consumption.)

Of course, people will assume, perhaps more correctly, that the NYT has the same editorial leanings as its print-web editions. After all, its content is pulled off another news source. We may learn that “fair and balanced” voice of Fox News won’t emerge in The Daily, aimed at a much more middle of the road audience than Fox News.

You can check out both of these online papers for free. The Daily is giving you two weeks to decide to spend 99 cents a month, billed recurring using a new version of the iTunes Store. NYT, needing the money much worse, is giving away two weeks, but billing you via your credit card using its own payment mechanism.

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.

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.