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

It’s a beloved bromide that you shouldn’t buy a 1.0 version of anything computing-related. Some say that you’re only helping the manufacturer iron out the bugs in such an early version of a product. Apple has fired a warning shot across the bow of us eager sailors, cresting into the uncharted iPad waters. If your iPad develops a charging problem, the vendor advises, it will only be $99 to replace the battery. Yeah, an extra $99, plus tax and the pain of parting with your new tool. Apple will give you a refurbished model as a replacement, so you need to have dumped your data into your Mac before the pokey iPad goes into the post.

Us early adopters take such arrows in the back as an expected part of being the first on our block. Apple enjoyed a healthy 1.0 release of the iPod (I owned mine within the first month in 2001), while the iPhone was much better on second and third releases than the $599 rollout model. (We added ours last year, about two years after the intro.) But we invested in the 1.0 iPad because it might move the needle a lot for quick computing, the kind that a small business needs to keep up with a jammed to-do list. That’s an experience we want to share first-hand, instead of repeat from others.

One of our allies, Bruce Hobbs of Engineered Software, is developing iPad applications after decades serving the HP enterprise business community. Hobbs is enlisting other software writers with experience in COBOL, a bedrock business language, to create something new for the iPad.

I’ve been reading books about and working through tutorials on Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder and iPhone and Mac OS X development. Michael Watson and I took a two-day iPhone development course back in November. I’ve also been attempting, with limited success, to lure a couple of other HP 3000 COBOL developers into a joint effort. Not sure yet exactly what we’ll put together, but I’m still hoping to have something in the App Store before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

There are a generation of good developers out there who have 30 years of business program creation in hand, talking to users and creating software that helps businesses small and large and in-between. Hobbs has been working in the HP 3000 heartland for decades, a place where both 10-person companies and Fortune 500s use that enterprise-grade computer.

It is probably too early for the average business to expect much from the 2010 iPad except a new user experience and advanced mobile computing productivity. The hardware will have its flaws, bad builds and disappointment. The software will probably only start to mature this fall, after Apple has released the 4.0 version of the iPad’s operating environment. (It ships with 3.2 early next month.) But developers like Hobbs and his colleagues, whether beyond age 50 or not yet 30, are excited about the prospects over the long term.

Hobbs pointed out an inspiring and pragmatic post from another iPad developer about the device’s potential. We like these lines best from Andy Hunt, who bills himself as Pragmatic Programmer:

We’re looking at the beginning of the true direct-manipulation interface.  No more wiggling a spatially disconnected mouse or scribbling on an eternally blank tablet with no feedback.  I think the effect of such an immediate, in-your-face interface will be pervasive and long lasting, in ways that we’re only just beginning to imagine.

It’s an exciting time to be using Apple products for business, as well as being in the business of testing, analyzing and reporting on Apple’s products. You will see the news, good and otherwise, up here once the FedEx fellow drops off that box next month.

Hobbs is also soliciting ideas for business apps for the iPad. Well, apps of any kind, but there’s nothing like asking a business veteran for a tool to make work a little easier.

Filemaker 11 makes it easier than ever to take business data and create a snapshot of your information to help plan. It's also got dynamic links to auto-update such graphics

The canvas of the Filemaker database is wide and rich for Mac business users, an enduring data capture resource that looks even more vivid in the newest release of this tool. Filemaker 11 rolls out today with a big palette of charting and graphics shortcuts, the kind of built-in prowess that makes a great case for using the $299 solution instead of an Excel spreadsheet.

If it feels crude  to substitute a spreadsheet for a database, Filemaker’s Product Group Manager Rick Kalman says research shows otherwise. About 40 percent of the 15 million copies of Filemaker have been used by small business or small groups within larger companies. Already familar with Microsoft’s iconic spreadsheet, they press Excel into record-keeping of business inventory, sales or contacts. In doing so they limit the power of seeing their business portraits from every aspect.

The primary competition for us is Excel spreadsheets and paper, frankly,” Kalman said, “and that’s a pretty good target.” The features run well beyond the Excel hints and assistants that suggest you might be managing a list. And Filemaker 11 adds a feature that’s fast-becoming a Mac software standard: the Quick Search window in the top right of many programs, such as nearly every browser.

There's nothing like this in Excel, and the new Filemaker includes templates to go to work immediately with a professional-class database

Graphics stood out in the one-hour demo that Kalman led us through about a week ago. The wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple is among the best of Apple’s captive partners at creating tools ready for businesses, and the Filemaker 11 is ready to show off a company’s products, people in client databases or internal staff and contractors, even a new feature that interacts with Twitter to push in-progress photo updates for custom designs like guitars or Web sites or illustrations. But the concept of pictures extends beyond the fresh graphics tools in Filemaker 11. A new Snapshot link “flags a specific set of records at a point in time, preserving the same layout, view and sort order. Any changes made to the file are automatically updated in the database. This Snapshot Link file can be emailed to anyone who has FileMaker Pro 11 for easy collaboration.” That means that changes to you data can automatically be updated in a collegue or client’s office if they have Filemaker Pro 11 at hand.

Filemaker 11 arrives at the latest stop in a 26-year line of development for the software that started in 1984 as Nutshell, created for the PC DOS marketplace. Before long the software was shaped into the Mac’s premier database tool and delivered to both PC and Mac users. Microsoft’s Access is a worthy competitor on the Windows side, but some small businesses don’t consider their information repositories to be the most valuable asset that doesn’t clock in or report on a time sheet. It’s short sighted, and Filemaker 11 goes an impressive step to meet these customers more than halfway.

The software has a starter-marriage cousin, Bento 3, which has gotten rave reviews and even enjoys an iPhone app to bring its data into the mobile world. But while Bento data moves into Filemaker easily, the transfer of Excel spreadsheets to get started in Filemaker 11 is a new feature.

Users who have extensive databases in Filemaker formats would be well-served to read through the product’s documentation to make a clean transfer that will preserve all your layouts and data fields. Import features for Filemaker databases go right up to Filemaker 11, but you’ll want to have an FP7 format of your database (used by Filemaker 7-11) ready for import. Filemaker is reaching back to the Version 8 and 9 customers with upgrade packages.

There are 31 database Starter Solutions in the new Filemaker 11, many designed for the business user

A starter solution for invoices helps you take advantage of the data-ready layouts and databases included with the software. A quick-start screen is also new, one of the many features Filemaker has added to get a business rolling quickly with an ample array of data tracking solutions. Populating these databases with existing data gets to be a matter of looking over their data fields and managing the match-up of your data with these fields. This data-match process still needs some work for the average user. Excel imports can only be done if they’re the latest XSLX format, so if your Excel is 2004 or older, you’ve got file conversion to consider, or an upgrade to a newer version of the spreadsheet.

Of such details are transitions to Filemaker from spreadsheets made. There’s enough goodness in this new version to justify an upgrade from 8, 9 or 10 (the older software must be upgraded by Sept. 23 to qualify for the discounted price.) If you’ve bought Filemaker 10 since Feb. 7, your Filemaker 11 upgrade will be free.

Halfway into a million-file scan, it's another two-plus hours to a clean bill of health

You want your Mac security tools to behave like Columbo, or Inspector Plodder from the play Sleuth. Not the fastest of detectives, but one that will not miss a detail. So it goes with the newest VirusBarrier X6 anti-virus and firewall product from Intego. You can set it and go, but you might as well go far away at first. Its initial inspections will take awhile.

On our 2.83 GHz iMac with 4GB of memory, that was more than four hours to do a full scan of our 150 GB of occupied hard disk. Full scan is a choice that the VirusBarrier setup prods you toward once you complete the easy install. Too bad that it’s so easy to send the tool into such thorough paces. VB X6 skips over the “check my malware file for updates” stop, so you notice that your file is “35 days out of date” amid a lengthy scan. We’d lead a user into NetUpdate, the VB checker for updated files, before starting a scan. This is also an “install and force a restart” program, not among our favorites.

A complete scan can be a once-in-a-great-while event, however. VB X6 has got one-0ff scan options for fresh files, or scan the folder, or whatever you want to drag onto nifty interface. The inspector is thorough enough to try to catch malicious scripts, the latest ploy in penetrating you Mac’s defenses. We were glad to see attention paid to a very long list of intrusion techniques like this. Drive-by attacks come out of scripts. You have to hope the malware file gets freshened up plenty to believe VB gets the job done. There’s good reason to believe it’s about 30 days or so between updates.

That’s because we’ve used the Intego products here since their V4 releases and watched NetUpdate finding fresh files at Intego HQ. VB X6 is one of those anti-virus products that arrives with 12 months of update subscriptions and collects a fresh $29.95 for the year that follows your first. By the time you’ve owned VB X6 for three years, you’ve bought the product twice. Of course, by 2013 there will be an X7, and you’ll have that year’s malware files included, if you buy it. (To recap: about $40 a year in cost of ownership, counting the updates, for Intego’s two-computer license.)

The genuine novelty of VirusBarrier comes from its extended controls over the Mac’s firewall. This was once called NetBarrier, just months ago, but now it’s included in the VB X6 package and called Network Protection. Intego used to charge $49.95 for NetBarrier all by itself. We know, because we bought it in December. By February Network Protection was included. While the upgrade to the X6 remains free until April for users who purchased late last year, if we’d waited two more months it would have been free and included.

We were not amused to learn that our X5 products that we’d bought in December got auto-updated to X6 during the install. If X6 had been a bust, we’d be reloading the older versions from a backup. How much nicer to leave an installed program alone and just load up a newer version.

The challenge in making firewall extenders like VB’s useful: You need to know your usual suspects when it comes to invasions of your Mac’s network. Intego does a much better job of explaining who to question than in previous releases in its online documentation. (Um, there are no docs if you can’t get online, like when you suspect an intrusion and want to pull your Web plug while you try to brace up your doors to the outside world.) The logs fill up with messages if want to watch over Inspector Plodder’s shoulder and suggest a new line of questioning. Deciphering them is beyond the average user’s ken, but we’ve got security whiz Steve Hardwick to do our decoding. You may not be so lucky.

This simple animation of your firewall's settings are the most likely view that business users will take of VB's Network Protection

Of course, these worrisome cases of attack are the best reason to invest in a thorough and plodding tool for protection. A MacScan study of our full system was complete in less than half the time, so we’re puzzled about whether VB X6 is more thorough or just eager to look at every single file. It was a puzzle how to tell VB not to examine those packed up download files the Mac expands to install software, or skip the acres of system preferences and files that only Apple installs on your system. You can shorten the time VB spends with all of these, but not eliminate them.

That’s symptomatic of the program’s downside — the need to tinker with its settings to tune up security. You can accept the defaults to get going, and tell VB to do a complete scan regular-like via a calendar. But you’d want to do this overnights. A good alternative is to rely on the “Real-Time Scan” feature, since it chews on about 10 percent of your Mac’s power all the time anyway. Anti-virus tools become a bog sometimes, the tar pit that your Mac tries to climb above while it stays safe — something like body armor you can’t sprint in while you wear it around.

The Web has become a combat zone, a place where a business can see hours killed off after a virus infection or a network home invasion. Nothing’s perfect, but it looks like if you want a beefy utility belt of security tools, and have the patience, budget and know-how to use them, VirusBarrier X6 will track down files with a criminal intent, and bar the door to unwelcome users.

Devices can be ordered online starting next week, or pre-ordered from Apple’s retail stores. Shipments start April 3 for online orders, with in-store pickups available the same day.

In a press release Apple’s Steve Jobs says the tablet, using a trademarked Multi-Touch interface, let users “connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

The device that will deliver a renovated Mail program (included) and runs $9.95 apps for Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet and the Pages word processor, does not yet include a camera. Analysts believe that Apple can sell as many as 5 million of the tablet computers in the product’s first year. Prices range from $499 for a 16GB WiFi up to $829 for a 64GB 3G+WiFi unit.

Some of the biggest enhancements to the business computing experience will come from Apple’s applications at first. The company promises a Mail experience that will let users “see and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox.”

The iPad’s Calendar tool takes a big step toward the functionality of the DayTimer and DayRunner journals of the 1990s. The landscape format and portability, along with the utility of managing several calendars at once, take the mobile device into the realm of portfolios we carried from meeting to meeting.

Apple’s refreshed a Web page that summarizes the initial value of investing in this business tool. The marketing copy focuses on the applications that will be available as included software.

The Mac enjoys an easier time in security because Apple’s product is a less juicy target. Malware and viruses are designed to make money for criminals, and the number of PCs out there running bareback is 10 times the number of Macs. Security by obscurity only works until it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of time, sad to say, before the criminals fan out and try to rob your system of power or privacy or both.

Anti-virus software (AV) is not just the paranoid geek’s tool anymore. The last virus we detected came off a Web page, and we last had data corrupted in 1997. But things have changed since Apple moved to Unix underneath it’s OS. Oh, and there’s that thing called the Internet, plus the Flash videos you may use to gather research (like from the Wall Street Journal’s site, now that they’re owned by Fox.) Flash, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF files, are a big target for malware today.

You have more than one choice for a commercial AV tool for your systems (that wasn’t the case in ‘97). What you buy probably should provide both firewall and virus protection. Two leading companies offer very different value propositions in their AV software. MacScan commits to a fixed price, while another supplier uses a subscription fee+purchase price model.

Today we look at MacScan, software built by a company that started tracking viruses in 2002 on the Mac. For five years MacScan didn’t even sell software; it simply created the definition files and patrolled the Web for criminal weapons. Since ‘07 they’ve sold MacScan, which despite claims from its competitor Intego, still looks like a worthy value for AV.

Intego, whose products we’ve run at Bites HQ for more than three years, now sells a $49.95 X6 edition of VirusBarrier that protects two Macs. The MacScan 2.7 software protects three systems for the same price. (There’s also a 1-Mac license for MacScan for $29.95; Intego sells only its 2-Mac license.) Figuring the relative value requires you to consider the protection scope of such products. MacScan’s product manager told us at Macworld that the company ships along regular updates of the virus profiles, at no extra charge.

MacScan makes a significant point of examining Web cookies, a source of malware targets, in its regular process. A half-full iMac in our offices took more than an hour to probe with MacScan, but the AV software found nine tracking cookies in the first minute. And no viruses or other spyware. We got an option to disable these ad cookies after MacScan caught them.

A tracking cookie is not something you allow easily into your Mac. While you might not want to erase all of them, these are used by advertisers on Web sites to track your Internet use: where you browse, how you jump from links, even the information you enter into forms online. A fine article on the World Privacy Forum’s Web site explains that “allowing the tracking types of cookies to follow you around as you surf the Web is a lot like building a see-through house to live in, click by click.”

MacScan doesn’t reach any deeper into the malware world, though. It’s good at finding troublesome files on the system, but it won’t do a thing to block access to your computer. Apple’s firewall is the default for the MacScan user. While that’s better security than none, it might not be enough to keep prying spooks from hijacking your bandwidth.

Doing one thing well, and affordably, is noble and true to the Macintosh Way. We like to see more of what back doors might be open on our Macs, however. The extra features of firewall improvement are included with the new VirusBarrierX6. But they’re not easy to use, or so valuable that Intego could keep selling this super firewall that it once called NetBarrier as a standalone product. That’s for Monday, though.

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.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes.

I never want to learn that my original data file has now become a “file that needs a newer version of Quicken” than I had before my conversion. Alas, my 2005 data was tagged as a Quicken for Mac 2007 file. It’s simple enough, I’d think, to simply save my old data in a renamed file.

An interview with the Quicken for Mac product manager Eddy Wu, during a live demo, told a story of a product line in transition. Quicken for Mac 2007 is not being put to pasture, even as Essentials emerges with some very good ideas from Mint.com. Intuit is putting some fresh wood behind the arrow of Mint, a solution some users saw as salvation from an Intuit that had strayed far from acceptable value in Mac users views.

There are people running businesses on Macs who would cringe at the thought of using QuickBooks, even though it’s got invoicing, AP and AR ledgers, all the standard and essential tools for real business financials. (Okay, the payroll solution is miles behind the Windows QuickBooks software, but that’s not as damning for a small enough business to have no payroll, just 1099 contractors.)

Wu said that there will be other versions of Essentials to come, improving on things like investment reporting. The company is listening, having acknowledged the pain of its Mac customers and hoping some Mint ideas might help. Unfortunately the pain isn’t throbbing from the need for smoother interfaces. “I had such high hopes last year,” said a user commenting on Amazon, “when you were promising new good Mac versions, but alas, both Quicken and QuickBooks are missing essential features, which render them unusable.”

Not as unusable as a 2005 file that won’t open anymore, but you get the idea of the rejuvenation task that remains in front of Intuit. At a $69.95 by-over (can’t call it an upgrade), Essentials is still missing enough improvement to spark our new investment in simple business accounting.

In short, the iPad’s browser will be Safari and probably nothing else, since Apple wants to control this aspect of the iPad experience. But this Safari demo shows how the iPad can be a powerful research tool for gathering information from those Web business resources which don’t have a dedicated iPad app yet. The advantage to using this rather than a MacBook lies in the ability to share your results by just passing the iPad around — something cumbersome with a laptop, or even a netbook.

(Above video courtesy of appadvice.com.)

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.