Zinio will offer 2,000 issues for purchase (and another 400 back issues) through its free app, something the company designed as soon as Apple released the iPad’s software development kit. The company knew that a digital reader with full motion and interactive hooks would be a lure to readers who expect more from a publication than just words and static pictures. As of Thursday the company wasn’t sure if it would make the initial April 3 iPad app rollout lineup that Apple controls, but the CEO was certain that Zinio was going to deliver business magazines like Smart Money (from the Wall Street Journal) MacWorld, Kiplinger’s, US News & World Report — even Oprah, Yoga Journal and Esquire. All will enjoy the full-screen experience of the new Apple tablet, she said.

The Zinio catalog has been available for reading on iPhone as well as the Mac and PCs, but the Mac version runs on Adobe’s Air platform. Zinio has been working on removing such technology that doesn’t run on the iPad, substituting HTML5 and XML.

“We started to look for opportunities to optimize our iPhone app for the iPad, and have been feverishly de-Flashing our [magazine] files and our reader,” Mullen said. “We’ve been rebuilding our infrastructure to support the non-Flash environment.”

Small business owners won’t see many focused titles that have been optimized for the iPad’s features this weekend other than MacWorld. But Car and Driver, Dwell, National Geographic, Sporting News Daily, Spin and Zinio’s own Viv magazine are coming online first with video features and slide shows that take a reader beyond a magazine’s traditional graphics and text. It’s going to add a new dimension to showing off a publication’s article during a presentation. Publishers will have the chance to create animated, interactive graphics that might bridge the gap towards a need for skills in Keynote, Apple’s presentation app.

Any magazines you can buy from Zinio.com today and through the iPhone — all but Apple’s restricted adult content titles — can be bought and read on the iPad at launch, Mullen promised. A Zinio version of a magazine enjoys special navigation through a table of contents page. All Zinio titles can tie a reader closely to online content through active Web links. And the most amazing part of the Zinio offering? Apple hasn’t insisted on a way to collect any part of the subscription fees that Zinio’s publishers charge for issues or year-long subs.

As of late Friday before the iPad’s launch, the Zinio app for iPhone was the only download available from Apple’s App Store iPad section. But Mullen was confident that the company, which distributes some of the better-known titles in the magazine world, has permission to act as a newsstand. Zinio is already selling magazines through the iPhone, after all. By moving away from Flash, it’s shedding a light on new display technology. leading publishers away from Flash, admittedly hearing some grumbling, is going to be another force for change in the way graphic content — live and interactive — is presented. Flash is becoming a second option alongside the HTML 5 format that Apple wants to succeed.

“We redesigned the Zinio Web site for a shopping experience on the iPad,” she said. The magazine readers shop for titles outside of iTunes, and Zinio redesigned its readers for all magazines so it drops Flash. A good deal of the debate over the iPad’s chances to be an information hub surrounded the lack of Flash support. Zinio is following two paths: eliminating Flash and providing the publishers’ design teams with a Zinio software kit to create iPad-ready interactive content.

“It will help publishers understand exactly what they need to share with their media buyers, planners, ad agencies and their creative teams so they can start to design and include audio and video for a non-Flash environment.”

Magazine purchases through Zinio are handled via credit card in local currency. The company claims to have 80 percent of the consumer magazine titles available in its newsstand. Magazines are not mentioned in any of Apple’s iBook details, so perhaps Zinio will get the head start on selling some of the best-designed visuals and compelling writing available from traditional publishers. It also looks like those publishers will now have a guide to help them along the path to making research through a magazine an experience closer to TV, a movie or even a video game with interactivity. All this transfomation will take is a publisher’s touch, and the touch of hundreds of thousand of fingers.

That’s likely to be the iPad at it’s best: the touch interface that delivers the index-card organization skills of the prior century, without all the erasing and the need for a full boardroom-sized table.

Infinote is going to sell for just $2.99, priced as any app for the iPhone. On the other end of the pricing scale, The Omni Group will be releasing its flagship OmniGraffle visualizer and process charting tool. While Infinote is certain to be worth its price, it will be interesting to see the takeup on an iPad program priced closer to Mac software levels.

Having worked with the $99 OmniGraffle a while on our Macs, we can testify to its endless ability to create the likes of mind maps, org charts, story flows for creative teams, even process diagrams for manufacturing if you’re stubborn enough. Graffle has ample flexibility on the Mac, and the company’s development team boasts one of the most loyal user bases and cleanest reputations in the Apple community. Their heritage comes from the NeXT community, which created the foundation for the Mac’s OS X.

For many years OmniOutliner was bundled in with Mac software, as recently as the MacBook Pro systems. Today there’s a handful of free apps available for download from the Omni Group site. And the Mac version of OmniGraffle can be used for two weeks for free as a trial. (We’d recommend tapping the Graffletopia site if you’re taking the 2-week trial, since it provides a nice jump start with shared stencils.)

Graffle, and perhaps to a lesser extent Infinote, will show off the new interface of the iPad while they help boost productivity. While the appadvice.com list is currently overrun with games like Flick Fishing, business apps as essential as organizers and databases (Filemaker’s Bento is on board; not exactly a surprise from the wholly-owned Apple subsidiary) will be certain to emerge over the first few months of the iPad’s life.

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.

On the other hand, Apple’s Mac applications are changed on iPad. Most for the better, from first-hand-user reports out today. Mail is a smoother interface. iCal a better calendar than on the Mac. And Numbers, and Pages and Keynote? Now $9.99 each. They cost $79 retail (for all three) in the Mac version

The iPad won’t displace the Kindle mojo at Amazon. But you’ll never get anybody to call a Kindle a business tool, even with its not-widely-discussed 3G capability to let you browse the Web via Sprint, a free service. The trouble is the Kindle uses a crude, experimental, text-mostly interface. And that’s the heart of the Apple difference: how it feels. Literally, in this case, since touching the iPad is almost the only way to use it.

I’ve got a friend who dreamed of the ability to use iPad as a phone if you’re paying for the 3G service. Well, 1. The iPad-as-phone is not a great business policy to protect the juggernaut of iPhone sales, and 2. The iPad is telephony-capable already, via iCall (VOIP) or Skype.

Nothing’s perfect. A vendor’s business plan always has more sway over success than technology advances. Apple is calculating enough to let three product lines rise at the same time. It practices a prickly business mantra of crippling each of its devices with some key feature missing — like a phone, or a video camera, or Flash replay, or a still camera, or 3G. Currently it sells nothing that has all of these features in one product.

What comes next is the actual iPad rollout experiences and the look toward the promised HP Slate, if a tablet is on your list of business tools. HP sure has a fresh opportunity to release such a magic product, with multitasking, head-turning performance and 140,000 apps ready on Day One, plus heavy TV ad rotation to sell it to the consumers. Let’s give HP the Apple dream-up treatment for the time remaining until the Slate shows up. Or are we jaded enough to set our expectations lower? Aw, why be cynical?

We already have a good list of what the iPad lacks — the Slate needs to deliver most of it, right? Let’s just be sure to insist the Slate’s got things the iPad has at debut, like 10 hour battery life, a custom-built chip by the vendor (drat, no more PA-RISC built by HP) to optimize speed and contain costs, display technology built for sharing (IPS), and a 22-ounce total weight. Don’t forget about the revenue streams from music, movies and book content, too. I mean, where the device maker takes 30 cents of every dollar to defray the development and advertising expense of the Slate.

I’d also like to see HP open up, oh, 284 high-profile retail stores worldwide to shape the customer’s initial experience. Perhaps the Best Buy-level of retail clerk would not be the best baseline to populate these HP stores. Try to get 50 million visitors through those 284 doors over the year, okay? Because you’re establishing a breakthrough product nobody’s ever seen.

This isn’t a Mac, but it’s more than a big Touch. (I own one of those, too. Pretty small screen, but I love the Wi-Fi browsing I hold in my hand.) The expectations were as high as the stock price yesterday morning, $208. Not even Apple, which could polish up a river stone and sell it as technology, could create the magical device the tech world dreamed up over the last few months. At least not in a 1.0 release, while protecting its lucrative phone, iPod and Mac businesses.

I’ll be goofy enough to buy an iPad soon. No guarantees on iPad success. It may take awhile, since Apple wants to open a new niche. What a concept — selling hardware to people who don’t own your products yet, trying to create demand. Watch the slick opening salvo in Apple’s rollout party video. Don’t expect Apple to give up, like it did on its Newton, on this one.