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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Customers, vendors, users and hawkers are putting their cards, demos, data sheets and gimcrack giveaways in order this week after four days of Macworld 2011. Attendance was up 10 percent, we’re told, and the number of exhibitors is on the rise, too.

Although the number of vendors selling solutions, apps and hardware is below the gaudy days when this show spanned both North and South Moscone halls, plus Moscone West for sessions, a rough survey of the 2011 show revealed a bigger share of business-ready help: in apps, in hardware, in Mac software and in advice. Macworld 2009, Apple’s last, had more of everything except business: especially iPhone cases and iPod accessories. Those were still on display last week, along with a wave of iPad holders.

But 2011 was the year when Apple business users could find a Macworld supplier a-selling with no effort at all.

Two years ago, the Enterprise Software Alliance was about the only booth where Windows-friendly Mac software for business was showcased. This year a veteran firm from the Windows virus battlefields, ESET, was selling antivirus and giving away security training. The company said it has muscled antivirus maker Intego out of Apple’s retail store slots with NOD Antivirus 4. It’s called the Business Edition of antivirus for endpoints — what you’d call Macs, but now ESET uses the enterprise-savvy terminology, and perhaps technology, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Business travelers are often finding a client location — a meet spot, or an office — while on the roads. A new product here makes that a job for an iPhone of any sort, using the built-in GPS of the device. Navigon AG has launched a design-focused car kit for the iPhone at Macworld. The Navigon Car Kit consists of an iPhone mounting device and designer suction pad holder, plus an Apple-certified connection cord and a car charger, which powers the iPhone while on the road.

“The iPhone is the most elegant smartphone available, therefore a mount should never get in the way of showcasing the design,” said Gerhard Mayr, VP of worldwide mobile phones & new markets. The mount is designed to fix to the windshield to reduce driver distraction and position the iPhone for optimal GPS signal. Directions, whether they’re just Maps or a GPS app, drive down the battery in a hurry, so the included car charger and the five foot connection cable make sure the iPhone battery doesn’t drain. The kit is now available for the iPhone 3G/S and 4, and sells for $49.99 with free shipping — with an introductory price of $44.99 until Feb 3, from www.bringmobi.com.

The company says Navigon MobileNavigator is the first universal navigation app from a major GPS company (it’s been in business since 1991) that runs natively on the iPhone and the iPad. Users with MobileNavigator installed can use the app on both devices without extra charges. It utilizes the iPad’s large display and user interface with a higher resolution, and new menus. Route planning shows a scrollable, multi-touch map to select destinations in simple taps. Users can plan routes at home on the iPad and then send them to their iPhone for navigation on the go.

Navigon is located at booth 943 At Macworld Expo, where there’s free stuff in a contest. The company will give away 30 licenses for the award winning MobileNavigator app via a Twitter wall. Include a defined hashtag (#) (revealed at the booth) in a tweet. Winners are announced each day at 4pm on Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Macworld’s organizer IDG assembled a thick lineup of pundits for an Industry Forum on the day before the Macworld Expo 2011 opened with all the new products and solutions. Among the more interesting was a speaker who in 25 minutes worked to explain how your vendor behaves, in product design, release, and even killing favorites.

Apple is a pretty consistent and rational company, said Macworld’s chief editor Jason Snell. Despite legends like the Reality Distortion Field that has surrounded the company’s product activities here in San Francisco over the last quarter-century of Januarys, there are fundamental rules to guide a customer in understanding what’s coming next — and maybe more to the point, why Apple kills and creates the way it has for the last 15 years.

Snell focused on the period since 1996 because that’s the Steve Jobs era, the time when he returned to the company he founded and molded it with his image. The less said about the Apple of pre-’96, the firm that made the Newton and a raft of mistakes, the better. Comparisons to that Apple without Jobs and today’s company are ill advised.

Rather than viewing the Apple of this year, sans Steve, as an echo of that John Sculley-Gilbert Amelio mess, the 2011 Apple is a company that even without Jobs on the campus runs in his image. He’s not a cult leader, “but a man who has created a strong corporate culture.” Snell went so far as to describe Jobs not as Apple’s MVP, but more like a Michael Jordan,” leading a hand-picked team.

The rules in Snell’s rundown felt simple and familiar for How Apple Does It.

1. Build technology so you can control your destiny: the Safari browser.
2. Release no feature that isn’t perfect: the user interface of the iPhone, long after the world was littered with cell phones.
3. Let design lead you in creating products (see below).
4. Make engineering serve the needs of design: simple to use products are harder to engineer, but that’s success for you, the customer.
5. It’s better to get rid of a feature too early, than too late: floppy drives on the first iMacs, or Firewire ports on laptops.
6. Timing can be everything; don’t release before a product’s technology and its market is ready.
7. All products need showmanship as part of their release, whether it’s an industry event like last year’s iPad rollout or the ongoing push from Apple retail stores.

Snell admitted that summing up Apple in a 20-minute talk was daunting. But the details he chose to prove the rules above rang true. He showed a photo of thee Rio MP3 music player, released in 2000. the iPod arrived and blew away the Rio, because it had storage enough for thousands of songs, not the album-full of the Rio’s. The technology was timed right.

Apple is driven by design and not engineeering as a philosophy, Snell said, and that’s no dig at the company’s technical chops. Design is also a place where the company gets misunderstood most often.

“Design isn’t about making it look pretty; that’s one of the fatal mistakes its competitors make,” Snell said. “Most products are bad, and the reason they’re bad is that the more complex a product is to make, the more you have to rely on very technical people focused on details — who are trained to build very technical products. They make decisions based on their world, rather than the user’s world. Apple’s corporate philosophy is to design a product, and challenge their engineers to create the product that the users want.”

Apple and Microsoft used to be arch-rivals, but Google seems to have taken that spot in today’s market. Just the same, Microsoft has a multiple personality — maybe not a disorder — pose when it comes to supporting Apple’s business products such as an OS or office software.

From the Macintosh Business Unit, Apple desktop customers can get the first 30-day-free trials for Office 2011 starting this week.

Today Microsoft has made a free 30-day Office for Mac 2011 trial available at www.officeformac.com/trial.

This week also marks the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This year the Office for Mac team has a show special tied to the event. If you attend the expo check out your badge for details and see the Office for Mac blog for more information and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more Macworld goodness throughout the week.

From its Windows unit, CNET reports on a comparison between Windows 7 products and the iPad in the enterprise IT world, with some predictable results. I wince a bit when I see the Microsoft slide boasting that Windows 7 has support for “the largest breath of printing software” when it means “breadth.” Not a word breathed about Windows Tablets out there working in businesses.

Microsoft is big enough to be both kinds of creature in the Apple world: adversary and ally. Pick your posture while evaluating products.

The iPad alternatives are a-comin’ this spring, or so we are promised in a bit of web advertising from this vendor and that. The wanna-be’s of mobile desktops range far and wide in price, availability and size. But none of them can top the cheeky sass of Toshiba. The maker of DVD players and Windows laptops wants an iPad user to switch, sending a special nyah-nyah from its website.

When an iPad user arrives at the web page that teases about Toshiba’s tablet, you get greeted by the screen to the left, which is force-fed to you as the website determines you’re an iPad user. Mind you, Toshiba could have served up even more useful information in its we-haven’t-shipped message: Something like an exact date of release, or crucial data such as weight of their Tablet. Or its price. On and on it goes with the competitors to the best mobile computer Apple ever released. They want to remind you that you’re not part of the largest group of web users: the ones that have to swallow the battery-sucking, horsepower-choking Flash.

It’s quite the ad ploy, but Toshiba’s device managers must be hedging their bets, because Daring Fireball reported that lopping off the apple.html on the web page directs you to an HTML 5 page where its snappy movie runs fine. Runs even more apparently than the tablet, which doesn’t even have a video demo on the web. (Toshiba’s reading Daring Fireball, because less than a day after the HTML 5 trick was posted, Toshiba killed off access to everything that didn’t use the “apple.html” on the web page address. Odd though: apparently Toshiba doesn’t own the name to its product on the web; head to toshibatablet.com to see it’s got nothing to do with mobile computing. More confusing is that Toshiba sold what it called a tablet for months already: the Portege Tablet, all last year at about $1,700, because that sparkler was a Windows PC with a touchscreen interface.

What to buy for a tablet this year? You could wait to see what’s on sale by the time these Android-powered tablets finally clear company tests and go into the market. By that late date, though, Apple will have an iPad 2 ready for you to purchase, a device that now has more than 30,000 apps written for it. Even though it won’t have all those blessed ports (USB, microSD, video output, thick toast), the iPad 2 will be available to everybody on Day One (no shortages this time; Apple’s put in a massive component order and is building the devices now) and we know it will be under $600, somehow. Those two features, availability and value, are likely to be hard to beat by a wave of smarty-pants vendors hooking up with Android.

On that best-mobile-ever claim above: You can use an iPad (model 1) as your travel laptop even today. Starting Wednesday I’ll be posting news and photos using nothing more than my iPad, the 16GB no wi-fi model, a Kensington Bluetooth keyboard and case, and an iPhone for my camera. You’ll be able to read the reports from Macworld Expo — a show just crawling with tablet apps like the new DK Publishing travel guides to major cities, or the Mobile Office Suite that lets you edit PowerPoint presentations. See, while everybody with an iPad is likely to have another computer to watch that sassy Toshiba teaser ad, few of the Toshiba tablet buyers will have 30,000 apps to make their tablets useful. Not this year, or even by this time next year.

Boinx Software has released Mouseposé, a mouse pointer-highlighting tool for presentations, screencasts or demos. The software’s being sold at the Mac App Store for $16.99.

Mouseposé dims your screen and shines a spotlight on the area around your mouse pointer. Since mouse clicks get lost during presentations, the software lets audiences visualize each click by drawing a red circle around the pointer for each click. Users can customize clicks to coincide with a specific sound, or give right and left clicks different colors in order to easily tell them apart. When the mouse lingers over a window for an extended period of time, the focus automatically expands to highlight the window.

Mouseposé also sports keystroke visualization tools, so an audience sees each key pressed, for easier comprehension of product demos or training.

“Mouseposé is the perfect tool to grab your audiences’ attention and keep them focused throughout your presentation,” said Oliver Breidenbach, CEO of Boinx. He added that the software is “Our fifth app to hit the Mac App Store, and we are thrilled with the reception we are receiving from customers, and proud to be a part of this new purchase and download platform. We are working hard to make sure that all of our apps are available in the Mac App Store soon.”

With Macs heating up on the brink of tax season, Other World Computing is offering the first-ever 28-key wireless numeric keyboard for the computer, a hardware accessory the company says is a crucial component missing from the wireless keypads that serve Apple’s products.

The Cropmark LMP Bluetooth Keypad for Apple wireless keyboard users is cable/driver free. OWC is aiming the product at “anyone that works with numbers, from small business owners, accountants, restaurateurs, financial analysts, stock brokers, bookkeepers, and spreadsheet users.  These people that work with numbers prefer using a numeric keypad than the number keys across the keyboard, since the numeric keypad is similar to a calculator, featuring the ability to enter numbers with one hand for increased speed and accuracy.”

The accessory has the same cylindrical base and brushed aluminum finish as the Apple keyboard, and includes a custom linking connector that snaps in, integrating the keypad with the Apple Wireless Keyboard.  OWC says it’s moved down the price of the product from $45.99 to $39.99 for tax season. It has a full set of number keys, including forward delete, page up, page down and five additional function buttons. The Cropmark uses “scissor-type membrane keys” which OWC says reduces typing fatigue.  The keypad can also be used as a standalone device with a USB-connected Apple keyboard, as well as with MacBook and MacBook Pro Bluetooth-enabled computers. There’s no word yet if it will work with iPads via Bluetooth.

Other World takes orders online at the macsales.com website.

The financial reports coming from Apple yesterday made me take a sharp breath, and for all the most impressive reasons. The company derided as dead during the late ’90s announced sales of $26 billion over the holiday quarter. Apple’s on a run rate to post a $100 million fiscal year in 2011. All that, plus $6 billion in profits on a lineup with few products priced over $4,000, and most less than half that.

HP had a fine quarter in its last report, announced in late November. But the company needed more than 300,000 employees to sell $33 billion and post $8.7 billion in profits. The new CEO Leo Apotheker warned that profits would take a hit on increased R&D at HP. Apple’s R&D has been built-in to its profits, at levels HP hasn’t seen in a decade. At its flashiest, HP can point to a fall tablet from its Palm labs that could deliver hardware innovation to draw people to the brand. (The Topaz renderings, at left, show a 7-inch device sporting WebOS, innovation HP bought last year, rather than built.)

Apple’s new numbers put the company within 25 percent of HP’s sales and a $3 higher profit per share. There’s something special in any computer vendor’s sauce that lets it change the rules, as with the iPad, while it cranks out 71 percent higher sales than one year ago.

But it’s the combination of innovation and integration that Apple’s COO Tim Cook talked up the most in the company’s quarterly analyst call yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

One great reason to make the trip to Macworld is to buy off the show floor at discount pricing. Really useful planning tools OmniFocus and OmniGraffle came back to Bites HQ nearly half-off last year.

This year for the first time, the Expo organizers are previewing the show floor specials. It does good for the vendors hoping to sell from the floor, as well as generate Expo attendees for the conference.

Have a look at what’s previewed as of today (Jan. 18) and adjust your purchasing budget accordingly.