Order online at Apple's website

Search as you will for the deals from Apple’s retail outlets on Friday. The supplier advertises special deals on its products for the day after Thanksgiving, and the retail store pricing on Wednesday appears was as it’s always been on products at its retail outlets. The iPad, for example, was at $499 rock bottom. The retail outlets clambered onto the Black Friday bandwagon with slight discounts, matching those online.

The Apple Store online posts discounts only on Nov. 25. Apple’s got iPad 2s at $458 (plus tax) through the end of Friday (looks like they’re running that sale through midnight PST, judging from when they updated the store page early Friday), as well as the iPod Touch, the Nano, the iMac, Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air. The Air has the steepest discounts at $101 off the regular $999 price for the 11.6-inch model. That Air is a great alternative to the iPad if you need a keyboard — and the more recent models have a backlit keypad, too.

Check the Apple Store webpage for details. Shipping is free.

We’ve found the iPad for about $21 less, at $473.99, at MacMall on a Friday only sale. You have to call and talk to a sales rep to buy the iPad 2 at MacMall, mostly so they can offer you an upsell of a protection plan (which is a pretty good investment). MacMall’s at 800-622-6225.

The ebook store from Google made its debut today. It’s a Mac, iPad and iPhone resource, even though most of the books sold in the store won’t run inside the iPad’s bookstore, or run at all in any Kindle platform — either the device itself or Amazon’s Apple-based apps and programs. Google’s maintaining this store’s accounts on its web servers, in The Cloud.

Prices range wide at Google, but there's lots of titles

But searching for a best seller like The Four Hour Workweek, a Getting Things Done (GTD) guide, yields a nice cache of business-related titles. Google’s got an iPad/iPhone app for its bookstore that allows reading and searching. It lags behind the Kindle features of its app — won’t auto-rotate a book, for example. And auto-sync, to let you catch up to where you stopped reading on another device, must be coming in a later release.

What’s more, some of the Google titles are scanned pages, which limits your ability to search inside a book. This is a real benefit of Kindle titles as well as those sold in Apple’s bookstore. Prices? Well, Google is matching Amazon, most of the time, but they’re not beating the world’s largest online bookseller. Amazon is in the book business, after all. Google is in the advertising business, although now we know what that lawsuit and abandoned books legal dance was all about last year. Google was grabbing books that had dropped out of print. The authors who’ve got a publishing deal are being cut in for some royalties, somehow.

However, you can read anything you buy, or the free titles, on a Mac, although you need an Internet connection like any other ebook service to get the books onto your computer or mobile device. You don’t need to download a separate program on the Mac to do your reading. It all happens within your browser.

Bottom line, Google presents a way to keep the Amazon ebook experience on your Apple devices price competitive. Although Google’s charging sales tax, something still in the future for Amazon. Meanwhile, Apple’s bookstore falls even further behind, since it doesn’t have Google’s treasures like a copy of the 1990 US Census.

In its public beta version, Chrome was just an experimental browser, at first without even bookmark management. In spite of Infoworld declaring “Firefox is dead” this year, at least that browser for the Mac is years beyond experimental status. But as of this week, Chrome for the Mac is out of beta test and into a full release, the first of many. It’s promised to be fast, open and secure. A business user might consider Chrome as their window to the Web.

Picking a browser is like choosing a home repair store. You develop a habit of using one and stop thinking about the alternatives. Chrome is definitely a faster browser than Firefox in our use, delivering a payoff in the “time is money” formula. If you browse a lot, Chrome could be an upgrade. (Safari’s performance is much closer to Chrome’s)

But Chrome’s got some steps to catch up in other areas. In the Mac version we downloaded this week, some Web sites aren’t working completely. Our TypePad account editor (where we publish the 3000 NewsWire blog) won’t let us resize graphics for posts in Chrome. The editing features at the Constant Contact email site also won’t perform with Chrome for the Mac, either.

This puts Chrome in a category with the iPad: very fast and slick for consumption of information. Not so good for creating messages and more. As for the death of Firefox, that obituary shouldn’t be written yet. 350 million users won’t expire overnight. Read the rest of this entry »

Chances are, your doctor isn’t using a Mac. Over 95% of the electronic medical record software on the market today won’t run on Macs. But there’s an online guide that wants to spur more doctors to begin injecting Macs into their practices.

PC users have been switching to Macs for many reasons, and easier use is among the leaders. An article from the Software Advice marketing Web site makes good cases for why Mac-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software is ready to help in healthcare. The article lists on-the-Mac solutions, then goes on to track the software hosted offsite, but available to Mac users.

Web-based EMR software is a growing segment of the market and one that is appealing to physicians in a wide range of specialties. Because web-based EMRs don’t depend on a specific operating system, a physician needs to only have a compatible web browser (Safari or Firefox for example) on their Mac to access the software online. There’s no installation of software on a physical machine; all data is hosted in the “cloud.”

The number of web-based EMR vendors is rising but only a handful have optimized their software to run on a Mac-based web-browser. The Software Advice site points to demo versions of these applications.

The Take Control Of e-book guides are on sale through the end of the year, Dec. 31, at the company’s Web site. These are well-written, easily-search guides to all level of Mac use, including some aspects of Apple computing that a business operator can benefit from.

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.

The Web is full of so many free offers, but there’s one online right now that adds several business-ready tools to a Mac user’s tool box. MacHeist, which must be doing this to collect e-mail addresses, has offered “indie” software for a free download. You can look over the offer at the MacHeist site. But it all expires in five days (perhaps Thursday, Nov. 12 at the latest.)

The business-related programs are

• Write Room, which provides a clutter-free screen for writing without distractions. Not easy to get something written with all those Web pages, e-mails and Facebook feeds all around you.
• Tiny Grab, which snaps screen shots off of your Mac and plants them in your clipboard. Very handy for posting to a blog or a, yeah, Twitter/Facebook page.
• Then there’s Mariner Write, a full-featured word processor-writing suite that is an alternative to Microsoft Word. It also saves in Word format. The catch here is that 500,000 people have to download the rest of the programs for Mariner Write to be “unlocked.” It usually happens. In the meantime, five other programs are already unlocked and ready to use.

Here on Bites of Apple we focus on small and medium business use of Apple solutions, with an emphasis on partner and third party offerings. But this is a vast universe of reporters and Web sites. The best way to start with an overview is Alltop.

Take a poke into mac.alltop.com to see how many sites, organized by expertise, are reporting and analyzing what’s happening this week. Many have RSS feeds to let you stay current, once you find one that fills your needs Alltop also operates education aggregation pages, as well as ones for photo creatives.