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Good review with some important pointers that all software developers should pay attention to.  iPAD apps are essentially WiFi Web Apps at some level.  Once again the NoteCase Pro - Google Docs issue of HTML-CSS Stylesheets vs. in-line custom formatting comes up.  Again. excerpt: InfoWorld.com investigated the available programs and put together a recommended business apps suite that should be the standard install on corporate iPads. I was surprised to find that none of the iPad productivity suites is ideal, though one comes close. (I've added U.S. iTunes links for each app covered.) Related Content View more related content Get Daily News by Email Of course, beyond the productivity apps that nearly everyone uses, iPadders have further needs, so I've also put together a collection of additional business apps that you might make available to employees or point them to for more specialized work.

Open Source framework for building visually-immersive mobile ready magazines in HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript. excerpt:  Pugpig is an open source framework that enables you to publish HTML5 content in the form of a magazine, book or newspaper to iPhone and iPad devices. It's slick and feels like you are using a native app (we tested the it on the iPad) Pugpig is an HTML reader for iOS. It's basically a hybrid - part native application, part web app, designed to prove that you can have an HTML-based app that feels like it's native. Your app sits on top of the Pugpig framework. It can be customized and extended. For example, you can link to your own data source, change the navigation and look and feel. It can also be multi-lingual - for example, the sample app I tested leverages the AJAX API for the Microsoft Translator. Additional Pugpig benefits are its low memory footprint and ability to store a lot magazine/newspaper editions within the device, for easy offline viewing. You can offer your app in either the App Store or the new iOS 5 Newsstand (integration with the framework is in progress now).

The free CloudON app for iPAD provides a very nice ribbon interface for viewing and editing MSOffice XML documents.  Supports important workgroup features like "change tracking", show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions.  Very cool. Lacks support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness.  Time to do some testing.  Hope Florian catches this post :) excerpt: Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot ...... Speculation continues as to whether -- most say when -- Microsoft will release a version of Office for the iPad. (CNET blogger Zack Whittaker cites sources predicting a November arrival.) It's not like you have to wait months to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Last June I described how to use Google Docs and Google Cloud Connect to edit Word and Excel files on an iPad for free. The end of that story noted the likely arrival of iPad apps supporting Office file formats. One of the most popular of these is the $15 Quickoffice, a program that was recently acquired by Google. But before you shell out for an Office alternative, check out the free CloudOn app, which now connects to Google Drive and Box accounts as well as Dropbox accounts. Other new features in the latest release let you send files as e-mail attachments and open PDFs. (See Lance Whitney's post on the Internet & Media blog for more on the program's PDF features.) CloudOn's ribbon is a big departure from the Quickoffice interface, which look nothing like Office. (Of course, many people will prefer the clean, clutter-free look of Quickoffice.) None of the Office extras, but all the essentials: In a group setting CloudOn's lack of support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness. Still, the word processor lets you track and accept changes, show or

Good interview with Charles Jolley - SproutCore - WebKit (met Charles at Web 2.0).  He has left Apple and started a SproutCore Web App development company called "Strobe".  Looking very good Charles! The Blended Brew Apps have become a preferred way of accessing information on mobile devices. But developers want to provide a unified experience, and that is why Jolley believes that we will soon have apps that use HTML5 inside a native app wrapper. "People are looking for an either/or solution, but it is not going to end up like that," he said. Think of Strobe's offerings as a way to create an experience that is a blend of HTML5 and native mobile apps. How this works is that an application is developed in HTML5 instead of proprietary formats. It is wrapped in a native app wrapper for, say, the iPhone, but when accessed through a web browser on a PC or any other device, like tablet, it offers the same user experience. This is a good way to solve a problem that is only going to get compounded many fold as multiple endpoints for content start to emerge. The co-existence of web and native apps also means content publishers need to think differently about content and how it is offered to consumers. The multiplicity of endpoints (iPhone, iPad, TV and PC) is going to force content producers to think differently about how they build the user experiences for different sets of screens. Jolley argues that the best way to do so is to stop taking a document-centric view that is part of the PC-era. In the touch-based mobile device era, folks need to think of ways to have a single technology stack married to the ability to create unique experiences for different devices. And if you do that, there is no doubt that HTML5 and native apps can live in harmony.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft is going to pound on "productivity" as the key differential between their desktop-cloud-mobile computing products, and those of mobile-productivity platform challengers, Apple and Google. There are three platform contenders, and this article points out that it is Google Apps that is keeping Apple in the business productivity game. Very interesting insight. Especially since a recent Forrester Report has the Apple platform capturing 65% of all mobile business application development. And Microsoft with only 1%. Google weighs in with 13%. This is a stunning setback for Microsoft. The MS monopolist empire is built on business productivity, with 98% of clinet/server marketshare. excerpt: "Over time, Microsoft has tried to tilt the marketing message to position Surface as a "productivity tablet". Now that Surface 2 is out, the "productivity tablet" message is coming across loud and clear. But can what people use tablets at work for actually be described as "productive"? Surface might be new, but the idea of using tablets in business is not. Although Microsoft would like us to believe that a tablet that doesn't run Office and doesn't have a good solution for a keyboard can't be used in business, the iPad has been used in business since its release in April 2010. Mobile device management (MDM) allows enterprises to control which apps are available on both on BYOD and enterprise-supplied tablets. Some MDM vendors publish reports and surveys on what their customers' allow and disallow. This information can provide some insight into what apps people are typically using. Back in June, my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reported on a report put out by one such vendor. Fiberlink gave this list of iOS apps that are commonly whitelisted: iBooks Adobe Reader Google Citrix Receiver Numbers Dropbox Pages iTunes U Keynote WebEx Along with those apps, you also need to add that apps that come with the device - namely web browsing, email,

Add this to the Sports Illustrated "immersive" magzine for the iPAD as clear indication that the entire idea of what a visual document is has changed dramatically.  Radically. excerpt: The coolest media experiences that I've seen on the iPad - Operation Ajax, a graphic novel created specifically for the device. At the time, the idea was still very much in development, but today the Operation Ajax application has gone live in Apple's App Store. The major startups in digital comics, ComiXology and Graphic.ly, have focused their energies on making deals with publishers to transfer existing comics to the iPad or other devices. Operation Ajax, on the other hand, was created with the iPad in mind, avoiding some of the issues that come with transferring from print (the iPad screen is slightly smaller than a standard comic book page, for starters), and also making the supplementary material that can't be delivered in print a natural extension of the experience.

Excellent review of Windows 8, including some prescient thinking about what it means to have HTML+ Web Apps running natively on the Win8 OS platform.  The author/reviewer Sebastion Anthony suggest why this breakthrough is a problem for Google, Apple and Mozilla.  I'm wondering though; is this a problem for the Open Web future?  Or is this a positive step towards an Open Web communications and collaborative computation platform that  is used by all and owned by none?   After nearly thirty years of a love-hate-hate more than ever relationship with Microsoft, for sure Win8 and native HTML+ is something to carefully watch.

Soonr is an extremely well done document management service alternative to DropBox, Box.net, SyncDocs and a host of other services in this new Cloud sector of integrated document services.  What makes Soonr different is there focus on project management, with resource management for documents, collaborative notes and workgroups.  Nicely done.  Great iPAD interface.  Needs wikiWORD in the worst way.  Especially in the wake of Jive's purchase of OfficeSync. excerpt: Soonr is the first cloud file storage service to offer integrated editing for Microsoft Office documents on the iPad. Unlike cobbling together of file storage apps such as Dropbox and SugarSync with editing apps such as QuickOffice and Documents-To-Go, Soonr brings it all together so you can directly edit any files stored in the cloud using a single app. No configuration, no hassle, no cross-app interdependency. It also works offline when you don't have a Wi-Fi connection and will sync back up when you do. And you can store, share, access, search, edit and sync your files from any tablet securely through Soonr.

Move over Flipboard, Push Pop and TreeSaver.  Here comes OnSwipe.  Packaging a Web site for a highly interactive and mobile world just got easier. excerpt: OnSwipe does something web developers should have been racing to accomplish ever since the iPad was first unveiled: it makes a website -- any website -- into a tablet-friendly experience. (It's already available to everyone who publishes their blog on Wordpress.com.) It uses HTML5 to make a site feel like an app, even though it's running in the browser. Onswipe points to a future of tablet media delivery that is incredibly simple, even boring: Websites that are designed to look good on tablets. Given the history of creating alternate designs for sites in order to make them mobile-friendly, why anyone ever imagined it would be otherwise is baffling. Probably, it was wishful thinking. IPad magazine app sales are tanking. Media aggregation apps like Flipboard and Zite are re-atomizing publishers' content into pleasurable, full-screen, mostly ad-free experiences. The great do-over that tablets were to represent for publishers like Condé Nast -- a chance to put the free-content genie back in the bottle, and charge for admission -- appears to have gone bust. Onswipe and the startups that will inevitably follow in its wake are the final nail in the coffin of the dream of appification of magazines and other media content

I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

Is the Open Web Dead?  In this very interesting interview with Wired's Chris Anderson, there is that possibility that Web Apps of the future will be like today's mobility apps; based on carefully controlled and closed platforms that use the Web's reach as transport. excerpt:  I love the web, I hope the web isn't dead, but there is a demonstrable shift in user behavior towards mobile. And mobile brings with it two things: First of all there is a shift towards apps. Mobiles tend to be optimized for apps because of smaller screens ... The other aspect of the web, which was implicit in your question, is the notion of "openness" which is built into the web. And increasingly we see closed platforms that happen to use the web as their transport and display -- sites like Facebook -- which are not open. In the definition we chose, Facebook does not count as the "open web". Your iPad does not count as the "open web," Xbox Live does not count as the "open web". They use the internet as transport and sometimes they use HTML as the display technology and sometimes they render in a browser. By and large, they are not open ecosystems and therefore don't fall into Tim Berners-Lee's original definition of "the web". So I would say there is very much a shift away from the wide-open web to closed platforms. Some of those closed platforms are on mobile, some of them are closed platforms within browsers, but we're definitely seeing a shift -- and frankly it worries me as a consumer but it's a huge opportunity as a producer. So I am conflicted in that respect. I love closed platforms as a way to build a business, but as a consumer I prefer open platforms. That's not hypocrisy, it's wave particle duality if you will, but that's where we are.

Pretty funny quote: "I think the future is going to WebKit". Brad Neuberg is leaving the gDOCS-Chrome JavaScritpt team to strat his own "HTML5" business. He's an expert on the SVG Web. About a year ago i read a lament from a web developer concluding that SVG was destined to be the Web docuemnt format, replacing HTML. Now i wonder if that guy was Neuberg? http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html Sent at 10:05 AM on MondayGary: Finally, the money shot: "Somebody will take some HTML5, and geolocation, and mobile applications, hook into Facebook perhaps, and they're going to do something unexpected." Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html#ixzz124U9xTZ3 Sent at 10:13 AM on MondayGary: I think Brad is right about the combination of location with the rest of the App Web. Olivia and i have had our EVO's for about two weeks now and it's amazing. She also has Citania's iPAD, also an amazing device. What stuns me about the Android EVO is how extraordinary the apps are that combine location with information specific to that location. Incredible. I don't know how i ever lived withou this. One things for sure, my desktop can't do this and neither can my notebook. Sent at 10:16 AM on MondayGary: There is another aspect i see that i guess could be called "location switiching". This is when you QR Scan QR barcode on something and the location of that objects life is at your fingertips. Everything from maps, street views, web sites, product history, artist/designer/developer and on and on. We went to the San Carlos Wine and Art Festival yesterday, where Laurel and San Carlos streets are closed off to traffic, and lined with food, wine and beer vendors of all sorts, artists and craftsmen, and even an antigue car show with ully restored automobiles and other vehicles. It was amazing. But then i started QR scanning! Wow. The Web merged with life like nothing i've ever imagined possible.The key was having the Internet in my pocket, and the Internet k

Convert Content for Android OS Making your content mobile friendly is harder than it sounds. However, more tools are emerging to help companies create content for multiple platforms, from iPads to smartphones, across a variety of operating systems. Recently, AppsGeyser privately launched a web platform that allows you to convert any web content to an Android App. With AppsGeyser companies can create an Android app three ways: Grabbing any website content block or web widget Copying and pasting HTML code, JavaScript, AJAX or Flash Entering the URL of your website Nifty tool for instantly converting web site widgets into Android Apps.  Looks like a new category of tools to make legacy Web services mobile-ready.  Titanium

Excellent must read!  Best explanation of what is currently driving Silicon Valley.  Charlie puts all the pieces in context, provides expert perspective, and then pushes everything forward to describe a highly probable future.  MUST READ stuff! excerpts:  I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future - the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn - on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ... We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing.  With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. .....Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. ......  It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door.... Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%.  At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatev

The General Services Administration made a bold decision to move its email and collaboration systems to the cloud.  This is a huge win for cloud-computing, but perhaps should have been expected since last week the Feds announced a new requisition and purchase mandate that cloud-computing had to be the FIRST consideration for federal agency purchases.  Note that the General Services Administration oversees requisitions and purchases for all Federal agencies!  This is huge.  Estimated to be worth $8 billion to cloud-computing providers. The cloud-computing market is estimated to be $30 Billion, but Gartner did not anticipate or expect Federal Agencies to embrace cloud-computing let alone issue a mandate for it.   In the RFP issued last June, it was easy to see their goals in the statement of objectives: This Statement of Objectives (SOO) describes the goals that GSA expects to achieve with regard to the 1. modernization of its e-mail system; 2. provision of an effective collaborative working environment; 3. reduction of the government's in-house system maintenance burden by providing related business, technical, and management functions; and 4. application of appropriate security and privacy safeguards. GSA announced yesterday that they choose Google Apps for email and collaboration and Unisys as the implementation partner. So what does this mean? What it means (WIM) #1: GSA employees will be using a next-generation information workplace. And that means mobile, device-agnostic, and location-agile. Gmail on an iPad? No problem. Email from a home computer? Yep. For GSA and for every other agency and most companies, it's important to give employees the tools to be productive and engage from every location on every device. "Work becomes a thing you do and not a place you go." [Thanks to Earl Newsome of Estee Lauder for that quote.] WIM #2: GSA will save 50% of the cost of email over five years. This is also what our research on the cost of email o

SMEStorage provides provide a cloud storage gateway in which file meta-data is synchronised, but all files continue to reside on the original storage platform. In this way SMEStorage can offer value added services and clients to existing cloud storage providers, whilst also providing a single cloud file system which enables files from many different cloud storage providers to be managed in one cloud file tree. SMEStorage provide services to individual users, and also to corporate users via its Organisation 'FileServer in the Cloud' platform offering, which combines file sharing, user management and collaboration features.

Jonathan Deutsch and Ryan Nielsen left Apple late last year to join Y Combinator's accelerator program and help designers build animations in HTML5 as opposed to Flash. Friday, the two-man team is releasing Hype, the first product of their startup Tumult, on the Mac App Store. Hype, which sells for $29.99, uses WebKit to render pages and has been crafted so that anyone comfortable with using Keynote or PowerPoint can start building animations in HTML5, no code required. "It's pretty clear that HTML5 is the future of the web," says Deutsch. "It will, of course, run not only on desktop machines but also runs really well on any modern smartphone or tablet like the iPad. The problem is that there are no good designer apps for creating animated HTML5 like there are for Flash." Hype presents the user with a blank canvas with a timeline at the bottom. The user can then drag in images, video and text, arrange those elements and use keyframe-based animations to define where those pieces of content go.

Good quotes.  The Wired article is also worth reading.  The important take away being that Apple is fully committed to native browser HTML5.  So is Google.  But, i found out at the Web 2.0 - WebKit party in 2009, there is quite a bit of tension between Apple WebKit and Google.  The problem being that Apple is doing all the work while Google is pumping up HTML5, Web Sockets and Native Client; all of which are essential to WebKit, but also to Chrome OS, Chrome, Android and the Google Apps push. excerpt:  According to Wired, at an Apple "town hall" meeting after the introduction of the Flashless iPad, Steve Jobs unloaded on Google, calling the search giant's "don't be evil" motto "bullshit," before rounding on Adobe. "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it," he said. "Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy... Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash...The world is moving to HTML5."

iOS visual eBooks and magazine "immersive media" category.  Push Pop Press seeks to provide a platform for digital eBooks that are more multimedia content than text.  It's more like writing in powerpoint or Flash than Word.  Think flipboard.  Another interesting term used by Push Pop Press is that this is a "layout platform" for rich content. features:  A demo of the first book powered byPush Pop Press, Al Gore's Our Choice.A New Digital Publishing Platform Easy to PublishLayout and publish interactive digital books without writing codeMixed MediaTell rich stories using text, images, audio, video, maps and interactive graphicsInteractive GraphicsEmbed interactive graphics that use the microphone, accelerometer and moreMulti-Touch User InterfaceEdge-to-edge content without any distracting toolbars or buttonsVisual Table of ContentsBrowse through hundreds of pages quickly and easilyPages Load InstantlyPages load as fast as your finger can swipeStart Reading ImmediatelyStart reading the first chapter as the rest of the book downloads in the backgroundUpdatable ContentUpdate your content without having to update the appiPad, iPhone & iPod TouchPublish one universal app that can be read on an iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch