Apple’s mail program, Mail, is gaining a regular place for our business. One of the best things about this software is its ability to travel. We’ve learned to use it on our iPhones to keep up with e-mail while we’re out of the office. The 3G capability is what makes this possible, but you can check mail while mobile over a WiFi connection on other Apple devices.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

More than anything else, more than news of IT asset tracking software or a tiny mic to power an iPhone’s recording of meetings, or the reports of the $6 spreadsheet-plus-word processor for iPhone or transcription software for the Mac, people wanted to know if Macworld was healthy after one day without Apple. It would appear the patient was too busy frolicking to stop and have his pulse checked.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life‘s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

There’s apparently a lot to complain about since Apple launched the iPad era yesterday. A gauntlet of Engadget writers gave a series of ho-hum, “who-needs-it” reviews today. Some wanted to chide Apple for not reinventing the personal computer, especially after the rumor mills and hypesters had lifted this tablet to breakthrough status.

It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.

In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)

The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.

But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s new tablet is called the iPad. The breakthrough device is starting at $499, somehow — a price point nobody predicted, although larger memory capacities (up to 64GB) will be more. The base model is 16GB, still a lot of storage until you start downloading video. The pricing points kick up a lot for access to a 3G network-enabled version of the iPad. Add $130 to be able to access data — and that’s books, magazines, video and movies and TV, music — from anywhere you can get a 3G signal (ATT’s, although there’s no contract required.)

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

Read the rest of this entry »