Dan Miller

As more and more of us use the iPad for regular business chores, we're spending more and more time with its virtual, onscreen keyboard. That keyboard works pretty well as it is, but there are some tricks that every iPad user should know about that makes iPad keyboard input more efficient.

FuzeBox has just released a new iPad app that promises to turn that tablet into a powerful videoconferencing machine.

FuzeMeeting ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) is just one of several Web services-including Webex ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), GoToMeeting ( Macworld rated 3 out of 5 mice ), and others-that enable you to participate in online meetings, via phone or video, from your Mac. You've also been able to participate in such meetings from your iPad, using iOS clients and the tablet's built-in camera and microphone. But those clients have been hobbled compared to their OS X counterparts. This new Fuze Meeting HD app for the iPad narrows the gap considerably.

iBooks Author ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ) may be a fine tool for creating basic ebooks. But if you're an educational publisher and you want to produce electronic titles that are hundreds or thousands of pages long, with complex graphics, multimedia elements, navigational interfaces, and reader interactivity, iBooks Author won't be enough. But iPad publisher Inkling has another option.

The company calls its new Habitat publishing platform "cloud publishing" (to distinguish it from the familiar desktop publishing model embodied by iBooks Author). It seeks to replace existing publishing workflows, which are often just email- and FTP-enhanced versions of old paper-based systems in which authors, editors, and compositors send files back and forth.

I met with a bunch of the vendors at Macworld | iWorld who are touting tools they say will make iPads and iPhones better business tools. Two in particular stood out.

The first is a newly launched service called nivio. It lets you log in to a fully functional Windows desktop (specifically, Windows Server 2008 with the Aero theme) from an iPad or iPhone (or Mac or Android device), using any HTML5-compatible browser. (An iOS app is forthcoming.) Once you've logged in, you can use Windows applications and store files online, just as you would on a real Windows machine. So if you work in a Windows-centric company, you could still use your iPad for business.

iBooksAsk people in educational publishing about Apple's foray into e-textbooks, and you'll hear a consistent message: It's good for all of us--and good luck to Apple.

It's good for e-textbooks in general because "Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention," as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn't know otherwise that such things exist.

According to a survey by NPD Group, nearly three quarters of U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs)--those with 1000 or fewer employees--plan to buy tablets sometime in the next 12 months. And if those businesses are buying tablets, chances are those tablets will be iPads.

The survey--fielded in September and reported in that group's SMB Technology Monitor report--found that, overall, 73 percent of SMBs plan to purchase tablets during the next 12 months. That's up from 68 percent in NPD's second quarter survey. A huge number of those surveyed--90 percent--said they plan to increase or maintain their tablet expenditures over that same time period.

Parallels and VMWare are locked in an arms-race. Both vendors make software that enables you to run Windows on your Mac. They've been stuck in a tit-for-tat release cycle for years now: Every twelve months or so, one of them releases a new version of its software with a bunch of whizzy new features. Some days or weeks afterwards, the other one releases its own new version--usually with many of the same new features.

It's just happened again. Parallels recently released Parallels 7. And now VMWare has released Fusion 4. We'll be taking in-depth looks at both apps soon. But at first glance the differences between the two seem to be wafer thin.

MindJet is releasing an upgrade to MindManager, its signature mind-mapping program for the Mac. More importantly, the company is also readying the first iOS versions of the app.

MindManager's purpose is to organize ideas visually in expandable "mind maps." One typical mind-mapping scenario: You're in a brainstorming meeting, people are shouting out ideas, and you need a way to capture and organize them quickly. The new version, MindManager 9, has a few new tools to make that process easier.

OS X Hints reader AlbertHall found a simple-if counterintuitive-way to retrieve items you want to pull out of the Trash:

Open the Trash folder, select the item or items that you want to retrieve and hit the Delete button (red circle with line through it) in the toolbar. (If you don't see that button, go to View -> Customize Toolbar and drag it from the palette of available buttons to wherever you want to park it.) The item will disappear from the Trash and reappear in its original folder.

Microsoft is releasing the first service pack for its Office 2011 suite. According the Microsoft Office for Mac blog, the most significant improvement is that Outlook 2011 now works with OS X's Sync Services, meaning you can synchronize Outlook calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes with other apps.

According to Pat Fox, Senior Director in the Office Product Management Group, Microsoft had hoped to include support for Sync Services in the initial release of Office 2011 last fall. But that support was harder to implement than expected and so was saved for this first service pack. In the meantime, it had become one of the top feature requests from Office 2011 customers.

The Genius Mixes in iTunes are nice: They group related tracks in convenient playlists without any intervention on your part. But they do have their flaws: You can't see which tracks are in them, so you never know what's coming next. Also, if you have a small-ish library and you listen to the same Mix for a long time, songs can start to repeat, as though they've been duplicated. But Hints reader Plan K came up with an ingenious way to get the benefits of a Genius Mix without those two problems.

For starters, create a new playlist (File -> New Playlist or Command-N). For the sake of explanation, let's call it Select Genius. Next, select iTunes DJ in sidebar. (If it's not there, open the General tab in iTunes' Preferences and select iTunes DJ in the Show section.) At the bottom of the iTunes DJ window, select the Genius Mix you want from the Source drop-down. Click on Settings and choose to show 100 upcoming songs; while you're there, select Play Higher Rated Songs More Often to make it more likely you'll hear songs you like (assuming you're diligent about rating your tracks).

If you're a regular reader of this blog or the OS X Hints site on which it's based, you know we regularly post AppleScripts that do one useful thing or another. You may also be tired of manually copying-and-pasting those scripts from your browser to AppleScript editor or Automator. Hints reader Maxikubik felt that way, so he created an Automator service to do it for him.

But before you go to the trouble of implementing his script, note that you may already have a similar service installed: Go to the Keyboard pane in System Preferences, open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and look for a service called Make New AppleScript in the Development section. If it's there, it'll do much the same thing as Maxikubik's script: Select a script, then choose the service from the contextual menu. A new AppleScript window will open, with the selected script pasted into it. That service is disabled by default so you'll need to turn it on by clicking on its checkbox.