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.

That includes the iPad as well as the iPod Touch. Take Control Books, edited by Mac veteran Adam Engst, has a new PDF book title out to maximize your use of Mail while mobile. Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Written and edited by Joe Kissell and Dan Frakes, the 96-page book promises to make Mail more useful on these devices.

This new ebook takes a practical look at using the Mail app on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. It explains various email account options, helps you develop a real-world mobile email strategy that integrates with your Mac, explains the mechanics of sending and receiving mobile email, and provides essential troubleshooting advice.

Mail is one of the most useful things on the iPad, in part because you can create something in it — an aspect of the iPad that’s still gaining credibility. Even over a WiFi link, it’s become a ready tool in my business belt. Take Control has other Mail training aids as well, if your exposure to Mail is limited to your desktop.

We just got a free update to the Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard ebook, which covers plenty of nuances but is written for the first-time user of Mail. That’s been me, until recently, because I’m making a transition away from Eudora. (Odd behavior in Eudora under Snow Leopard. Beware.)

Engst’s group even has a special anti-spam edition of a book for Mail. These three titles are available in various bundles at a 30 percent discount. You can even download them for reading (using the EPUB versions) on your iPad.

While Filemaker has also made a run at small business with its $39 basic-level Bento database, Filemaker 11 is worth the extra $140. The Productivity Kit includes templates — ready-made database reports — to serve companies dealing in either goods or services. The Standard Edition Kit is aimed at sellers of goods, while the Service Edition includes templates for, well, services companies.

Filemaker 11 does ship with a raft of templates already, many suitable for the business user. But the company promises that the new kit’s free templates are “an integrated set of business tools and each module ties to the other, eliminating any need for duplicate fields, tables and data re-entry.”

The biggest advance in Filemaker 11 may well be its charting, and the Kit proposes to make that power ready to use, along with what the company calls “on-the-fly” reporting.

After a few days building and experimenting with the Bento database, it’s plain that the Filemaker advantages of customization are well worth its lift in cost. Starting with a set of templates that you can customize gives a small business room to grow and expand to new opportunities. Filemaker even includes a guide to database basics and one for working with Microsoft Office in the Productivity Kit.

Reports are the most obvious element missing from Bento, although that product does provide an Excel-like listing of the records in each database. Ready-made reports are the kind of solution a company would pay a consultant to create; it’s possible, with a good training resource like Lynda.com, to make these reporting templates go much further.

Filemaker says that its two editions of the Productivity Kit break out along these lines of business tasks:

Standard Edition (for companies selling goods):

• Manage contacts and suppliers
• Organize products and inventory
• Process sales orders
• Track projects and production
• Send targeted e-mails

Service Edition (for companies providing services):

• Track clients and vendor contacts
• Process service orders
• Organize information about service offerings
• Manage invoices and other key business data
• Send targeted e-mail campaigns

The kit also comes with a bonus e-mail marketing guide, one that Filemakers says included “valuable tips and tricks on creating customized email campaigns to market goods and services.” For that mission you need a means of delivery, and we’d recommend Constant Contact for your outreach.

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.

If you haven’t seen one of these books, it may not be easy to describe how much color and how many screen shots prance across the pages. This is a book for the switcher who’s moved from a business Windows system to the simplicity of the Mac — or a more advanced user who needs a quick refresher and can just scan a picture to recall how to reset a forgotten password.

The emphasis here is on the complete set of computing tasks at an everyday level. Using the Dock, entering a Web address into Safari, composing email in Mail, locating files you’ve downloaded from the Web: it’s all shown screen by screen in Paul McFriederies’ book. The lessons are broken down into two-page spreads with alternative methods for some tasks, such as uninstalling applications or customizing the Dock.

If you’re working with a Mac for the first year, or in the first year of using Snow Leopard, this training tool might be just the right amount of information to avoid overload. Some users don’t need extensive details on the nuances of networking, or the best way to bring iPhone voice memos onto the Mac without a complete snyc of everything on the iPhone with the Mac. This isn’t a power users’ book, but it’s got plenty to show the small business and creative user who’s exploring the utility of the Mac.

About 20 percent of the book covers using the highly-visual Mac apps, iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie. There’s a healthy spread devoted to iTunes, where across almost 50 pages you can learn how to manage music and the ever-growing controls of synchronization between iPhone and Mac.

One of the shortest sections of this book is its networking instructions. For plenty of users, networking amounts to linking with a WiFi network in their office or at a client site. Setting up a network is beyond the scope of this book, and securing a network isn’t covered at all. There’s a firewall in every Mac, but this book won’t help you understand that protection. On the upside, you’ll get a good primer on creating a robust password using Snow Leopard’s Password Assistant.

The Mac ships with software included to build Web sites, as well as features to record video from a Webcam or audio messages, but there’s nary a page about iWeb or Quicktime Player 7 in this book. The former is a underwhelming tool for building fundamental Web sites, while the latter is an optional install that provides much more multimedia power than Apple’s simple Quicktime Player.

But a training book like this one can’t really be judged by what’s missing as much as how it handles the included tasks, taught from scratch. You will learn how to create and manage iCal appointments or organize business contacts using Address Book, and this book — Wiley’s only Mac title in the Teach Yourself Visually Series — is a useful addition to a training library. It’s something to hand to the curious user who’s got the motivation to follow a pictured path to productivity. Let your Mac guru or administrator wrestle with one of Wiley’s 800-page bibles.

US $29.99

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.

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.

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity.

There’s no way you could have been in the aisle between the Dr. Bott’s booths anytime Thursday and believed this expo was less than any other. I haven’t been at every Macworld, but I’ve been at the last five in a row now. The previous four included Apple and this one didn’t. I didn’t miss the fruit company wizards. Last year Apple’s big news was what, iWork? We didn’t have people seven-deep, drooling over a phone which wouldn’t be on sale for nearly six months. That was a dramatic moment in 2007, like lining up at 4 AM to try to squeeze into the Reality Distortion speech. These things drive ardor, but I don’t find them to be a massive business lift.

I’m a technical journalist and editor since 1984, and a newsletter and blog publisher since 1995. I’ve used Macs in publishing and small business since 1987, and set up two little companies that rely on them, but I cut my teeth in the HP marketplace, in particular its HP 3000 business line. That vendor has killed off that product and turned its computing business on its ear. Innovation is just acquisitions for lots of HP’s inventing today. Apple couldn’t be more different.

For 25 years I’ve attended trade shows as big as 25,000 users, including close contact with the customers and show volunteers. Macworld 2010 didn’t exhibit a debacle, or slink away. I gotta disagree with the doom.

Yup, the show area was half as big. I didn’t care. I was drained after two days of interviews and demos and Q&A about features and business models and competitive stances. I said wow a lot, especially in the mobile apps floor space. I was impressed by products I didn’t know existed, because media notice is now fragmented and sliding so fast it’s harder to keep up than ever. What I didn’t miss at all was 75 booths’ worth of iPod accessory makers. Or the massive leather couches where you could watch media streamed onto TVs you could only buy at home if you hit the Lotto. Or the big honking booths from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft with lots to toy with, but experiences that would often not escape the labs as those products were released. At those booths you could talk to an engineer easy. But whatever they said to you then had to clear the business and marketing arms of the companies — and firms like Adobe and Microsoft have massive hurdles to clear in those areas.

Contrast that with the vendors who were on the floor at Macworld 2010. Smaller companies who often had innovation those larger beasts didn’t want to invest in. It was no problem in some cases to talk with the CEO of a little firm and believe they were really going to follow through with what they showed you. After 25 years of talking to software and hardware companies, you can tell sometimes what’s true faith and what is fantasy, or worse.

Yes, dead-on: There were less than 800 people in the room when Jon Gruber, Guy Kawasaki or David Pogue spoke, not the thousands at hand or watching remote screens to see Steve Jobs year after year. What did this matter? 700 media credentials were issued and the press room was busy, albeit not packed. People were watching and writing this week with a larger audience than the total attendance of 10 Macworlds. What’s more, their insight and summaries are going to be available to the Mac world on Web sites like this one for a lot longer than what you’ll remember from a suitcase full of data sheets and demo disks.

I’ll remember this: A David Pogue one-act as part of his keynote, a parody mashing up Steve Jobs’ life with It’s a Wonderful Life, played by the likes of The Gregory Brothers and LeVar Burton, that plucked the heartstrings of the Mac faithful — those of us who suffered through the 90s — just as ably as any tune that Jobs ever fiddled from a Macworld auditorium that only the lucky few could enter. (We saw last month how declined Steve’s demo skills have become, when he blew through his iPad demo points via Web access that looked slow and peppered with blue-box reminders of a Flash-less Internet experience. If you saw the show live, rather than the cleaned up Apple video, you can hear the chuckles from the audience while Steve-o showed the “best way to experience the Web.”) I love the iPad’s concept and believe in The Job’s ability to make it ready for work users. But I didn’t need Steve Jobs to distort the iPad reality on Jan. 27, or this week at Macworld.

It’s just as hard to predict the campaign of the iPad’s progress as it is to forecast the future of a trade show that’s already 25 years old and is working to change. But I saw changes in this year’s event that give me hope, the kind of faith I have in Apple’s pursuit of iPad business. I saw conference sessions, like a User Show with a half-dozen tracks, providing great training at several levels of expertise from seasoned consultants. I attended three sessions, and each gave me more value than the $27 I spent to attend them. The e-mail client showdown all by itself was worth the whole $79 one-day user conference pass. (You want to attend the conference sessions, really. Even for just one day. You could download every PowerPoint deck for every track, no matter what you’d paid for, once you entered the session hall in Moscone West. Talk about hidden value.) The show did heavy discounting this year, and you had to be pretty unplugged to need to pay for your Expo pass.

Macworld had gotten too big for all of it to be useful, bloated as bad as any Microsoft or Adobe product by the time Apple pulled away last year. The economics of this year’s experience are measured the most by how the exhibitors felt. I didn’t talk to a single one who was disappointed with floor traffic, and I didn’t even stay to see the Saturday floor, which had the potential for being unprecedented.

Who will be back in a booth in 2011? Well, there were 80 iPhone app companies squeezed into microscopic kiosks, with traffic so jammed I got lost and talked to a company that wasn’t even on my interview list. That kind of random messaging and learning is why we come to shows instead of sitting at our browsers to learn. The kiosk people will be back, and some will spring for more elbow-room to demo.

Go ahead and believe that the 2008 model of Macworld is the only one worth attending, if you want. I have a feeling that when you can get a sharp pencil like Jon Gruber to talk for an hour about Apple’s weak spots — the problems it needs to address — you have a more useful show than the one where everybody tiptoes around the El Jefe Vendor who is the patron of the Mac populace. I have January 25 circled for next year’s calendar, even while I admit there’s an outside chance that IDG collapses its business in the Mac expo market. But I bet not. It’s harder to build business than to rediscover it.

It’s tough times out there, which is a better explanation for a downsized show floor than “There’s No Apple” to bring its black-shirted staff up the road. I’ve talked to Apple Macworld staffers who were no more savvy than anything experienced talking about Entourage. (By the way, Microsoft seems to be moving away from Entourage to Outlook, so maybe nobody at MS cares about those template answers anymore.) I didn’t struggle to compare e-mail, or scanners, or backup products, or mass storage. I had an easier time for some of that because I didn’t have to hike more than a mile from hall to hall. People were getting by with less to exhibit, and you knew that those who were there were selling and building for the long run.

One 10×10 booth was staffed with eight people from a small but sharp company. They saved the square footage and cartage charges but sent their best. You need to have staffed an exhibit to know how this works, but as IDG you want that booth size to grow from kiosk to small to larger. Macworld got a reset of its economic model this year. You could forecast its demise. But that wouldn’t be a lot smarter than subscribing to Dell’s premature obituary for Apple.

You can let go of the old trade show model, if you try, and open your eyes to the potential for something better. I say let’s see, in person, what Macworld Expo can become. This looked to me like the first year that I attended Appleworld, not just Macworld. I didn’t observe a business event that was in trouble, just one in a state of change.

But even one day of those sessions is only $79 through tomorrow night. Some reports show that more than 20,000 attendees are already registered for the first Macworld Expo that won’t have an Apple keynote or a booth. The conference begins in earnest Feb. 11 and features its first Saturday hours this year.

Register at the Expo Web site using the priority code MWHOLIDAY to get the discounts.

We’ve reviewed the guide for securing WiFi, for example, and invested in our own copies of the Snow Leopard guides (Upgrading, Exploring and Customizing the newest OS version), the AirPort networking guide (essential if you set up an office net without yards and yards and cables) and even something as complicated and powerful as permissions.

From that last guide I got a tip on FileExaminer, a dandy $10 utility that sets permissions on files so you can transfer music and photos from one system to another without the vexing “permissions not sufficient” error box.

Take Control guides are written by the staff of TidBits, one of the very best Mac resources online. Tonya and Adam Engst have run the company for years as man and wife, a combination that delivers a broader range of strategies.

The guides, delivered as PDF files, cost as little as $5 in the current 50 percent off sale. It’s hard to find a better value for training.