At MacWorld I learned about a handful of iPad apps that are great for work. Some have been around awhile, some are new. Here are my top 10 iPad apps for work.

1. GoodReader, $5, reformats PDFs so you can read them more easily on your iPad. Plus you can make annotations. And sync everything via Dropbox.

2. Office2 (Office Squared), $8, allows you to create, view, and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs right on the iPad. Syncs with Dropbox. QuickOffice, $20, is very similar but costs a little more.

3. OnLive Desktop, free, if you need to work on a Windows PC you can do it using this app. Store up to 2GB of documents free on their servers, so you can access them later.

4. Invoice2go, $10, create invoices on your iPad and send them to clients, plus if you are on Windows you can sync the invoices straight to your Windows PC. A Mac version is said to be coming out later this year.

5. Idea Flight, $10 for the presenter and free for everyone else, allows one person to use his iPad to control the screens of the other iPads in the room. So it’s great for presentations, no projector needed.

6. Agendas, $10, create an interactive meeting agenda that you can share with other iPads on the same network.

7. GoToMeeting and WebEx, both free, these allow you to join a GoToMeeting or WebEx meeting on your iPad—no need to sit in front of your computer. (You can’t host a meeting with these, however.)

8. Air Display, $10, use your iPad screen as a second screen for your Mac. Put your email or your IM on there, so you don’t take up valuable real estate on your main screen.

9. Remote Desktop, $6, allows you to control your Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC from your iPad. (There are other similar apps out there too.)

10. Notability, $1, allows you to take handwritten notes (as well as type onscreen), make drawings, and link audio recordings with your notes. It syncs using Dropbox. Use it with the Adonit Jot pen, $20-$30, which allows for much finer line drawing on the iPad than most of the stylus options out there.

On Friday we attended a “Rapid Fire” session at Macworld—a handful of presenters each had 5 minutes to talk about a specific topic or idea. Titles ranged from “5 iOS Tips You Can’t Do Without” to “Wild Things You Can Do with an iPhone” to “Ripping DVDs with Handbrake.”

Here are the 10 top tips we took away from the session.

1) Don’t you hate it when you’re typing on the iPhone and autocorrect changes what you wrote? An easy way to add words that aren’t in the iOS vocabulary is to use text shortcuts (on iOS 5 only). Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Add New Shortcut, and put your word in there. (Tip from Serenity Caldwell, staff editor at MacWorld)

2) Easily add instant LOLcats to any image using the CatPaint iPhone app. Only $0.99. (Tip from Karen Anderson, www.writerway.com)

3) Inventors are close to finalizing a “glucose tattoo”—a special tattoo that, when you take a picture of it with an iPhone app, it tells you your blood sugar level. (Tip from Karen Anderson, www.writerway.com)

4) In the Maps app on your iPhone: You know that double-tapping on the map zooms you in. To zoom out without having to do the pinch, do a 2-finger single tap. (Tip from Christian Boyce, christianboyce.com)

5) In the Maps app on your iPhone: Add a bookmark to a place you want to go back to, so you can find it easily. To add a bookmark: Drop a pin in the location, then click on the blue arrow at the right, in the dropped pin bar. Click on “Add to Bookmarks.” Later, to go back to that bookmark, click on the blue book icon at the top right of the Maps app. (Tip from Christian Boyce, christianboyce.com)

6) LaunchBar is a Mac application that for $35 allows you to vastly speed up your Mac use with keyboard shortcuts. Of course you can create custom shortcuts in LaunchBar, but did you know you can also:

• move files to other locations
• attach documents to email messages
• open a file in the application of your choice
• get multiple clipboards for copying and pasting
• do searches

All without using the mouse! I am buying this today myself. (Tip from Dan Frakes, senior editor at MacWorld)

7) The iFixIt app on the iPhone and iPad shows you how you can take apart and fix every single Apple product. And it’s free. (Tip from Kyle Wiens, head of iFixIt)

You can rip your own DVDs with 2 applications: Handbrake, which does the ripping, and VLC, which removes the digital rights management. However you will go to hell for circumventing the DRM. (Tip from Chris Breen, senior editor at MacWorld)

9) You can save a search that you perform often on your Mac by using the Save button and naming the search. Then add it to the finder sidebar. That way, with one click you can re-search anytime. (Tip from Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer)

10) Automator is built in to every Mac and it allows you to automate a series of tasks that would be extremely time-consuming to do manually. It takes a little learning but could save you lots of time for tasks you perform often. (Tip from Benjamin Waldie, whose website, www.automatedworkflows.com, has lots of tutorials on using Automator.)

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There was a lot of uninteresting stuff on the MacWorld show floor (a gazillion iPad and iPhone cases) but we managed to find 5 iPad and iPhone apps that look interesting. We haven’t tried any of these out yet, but are planning to do it soon.

1) CineXPlayer, $2
This app for iPad plays movies in multiple formats, including AVI, MOV, M4V, and MP4. They’re in HD, and the film plays smoothly, none of that jerkiness that can drive you crazy. And it’s got Dolby 5.1 surround sound (on the headphones; not so much on the built-in speaker).

2) Beat the Traffic, free
This app for iPhone has been downloaded 1.8 million times. It’s got live traffic maps, traffic cameras that show you the roads in real time, and it can estimate traffic for your commute home even if it’s only 2 pm.

3) iPresent, $30 per user per month
This iPad app is designed as a presentation tool for sales teams. You upload your own content to iPresent’s website, where you can create custom presentations out of your raw materials. They’ve got a series of templates and style guides for use. Then every iPad linked to your account can download your presentations, so they can be used even when offline. Great for a larger team with people in the home office creating content and others out on the road giving the presos.

4) WritePad, $4
For iPads and iPhones. It converts your handwriting into computer text, so you can take handwritten notes with a stylus on your iPad, convert them to type, and then save or send them.

5) TurboViewer, free to $25
This app allows you to view CAD files on your iPad. You can “pan, zoom, and 3D orbit” around your CAD documents. And it supports 2D and 3D CAD files. There are Free, X, and Pro versions, each with different capabilities and price points.

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We’re here at MacWorld, attending sessions and looking at all the new stuff on display. Here are 5 interesting accessories we’ve seen so far on the show floor.

1) Bluetooth keypad/calculator, from SMK-Link, $60
The new iMacs don’t come with a numberpad next to the keypad—and on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, forget it! This standalone numberpad functions as a calculator. Great if you do a lot of financial or numbers work. And it’s wireless, thanks to Bluetooth.

2) Zaggkeys Flex, $80
This mini keyboard to use with your iPad has real keys (none of that rubbery stuff) but it’s super tiny and light. Plus the case for the keyboard protects it in your bag, and also folds back into an iPad stand.

3) iKeyboard, $35
Their motto is “Touch type on your iPad keyboard” and this thin piece of plastic adheres to your iPad—when you want to touch type, stick it over the onscreen keyboard. It definitely needs a little getting used to.

4) Flygrip, $30
Stick this little piece of plastic on the back of your iPhone, and then you can hold your iPhone with your middle and ring fingers. While still having full access to the screen with your thumb. You don’t need to hold with one hand and type with the other. Comes in many colors as well as different sizes. If this were $10 I would buy one to play around with it, but I didn’t feel like spending $30.

5) NomadBrush, $18 and $39
This paintbrush is designed to work on your iPad, and it allows you to actually “paint” using a drawing or art program. Much more fluid and flexible than a stylus, gives you the real look of a brushstroke on paper. The more expensive model actually has 2 brushes, one on each end of the device.

(all photos are from the websites of the manufacturers.)

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The results are in from our survey of small business owners and individuals. We asked what tech purchases they planned to make in 2012, and here’s what we found.

What the data from home users showed:

• 75% said they plan to make tech purchases in 2012.
• Of those who plan on purchasing computers, the number one purchase that individuals plan to make this year is a Mac laptop, followed by an iMac.
• 61% plan to buy an iPhone.
• The iPad demand is significantly greater than the demand for Android, Kindle, or other mobile or tablet devices (not too surprising).

And what the answers from business owners showed:

• 70% of business owners plan to make technology purchases in the coming year.
• Mac computers are the most in demand in the category of hardware, followed by the demand for Windows PCs.
• iPads and iPhones are the most sought-after mobile devices by business owners, with the data showing a slightly greater demand for iPads than for iPhones.
• Very few plan to buy a Blackberry or a Kindle.

The photo of the North Scottsdale, AZ Apple Store is by At Home in Scottsdale, from Flickr Creative Commons.

I read an article this week from the November 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud, by Andrew McAfee.

Most of the HBR articles are geared towards leaders at large companies and this one is no exception. But there are some great points that are also useful to small-business entrepreneurs. Here’s my takeaway on the cloud for small business.

But first, what is “the cloud”? This term has been thrown around so much lately that nobody is really sure what it means. Essentially it means that you are storing and using your documents, or your software, or your databases on a computer that’s not in your office; instead you access it over the internet.

For example, if you’re using Gmail for an email account, that’s having your email “in the cloud,” because Google stores your mail on its computers. Or if you’re using Dropbox to sync files across computers, you’re also using “the cloud,” because Dropbox maintains the master copy of your files on its computers.

Okay, back to the HBR article. Here are advantages small businesses may get from using the cloud, whether they’re on Macs or PCs. Here are some things to consider:

Cost and time savings:

Pay for only what you need, as you need it: With the cloud you have no hardware costs (you don’t need to buy a server for your office). And no expansion costs (if in a year your server is too small). With the cloud, you pay for as much storage as you need at the time, and it’s easy to upsize or downsize.

Maintenance and reliability: If you’re managing your own file server or mail server, you have to deal with it when it goes down or stops working. In the cloud, that’s the provider’s responsibility.

Productivity:

Access: You and your team can have access to all important documents, emails, files from anywhere, quickly and easily. Even if on vacation in Jamaica or Aspen (as long as there’s a computer with internet).

Collaboration: Certain cloud systems like Dropbox for Teams allow you to quickly give access to specific files to certain people and not to others. No more emailing giant documents around.

Management: With some of these cloud systems you can get a report of which documents people have edited, how many people are sharing documents, what stage a project is at, and other useful information that allows you to manage how a project is proceeding.

Here’s where I include the disclaimer: The cloud isn’t right for every business. It depends on your industry, your setup, your needs. But it’s something you as an entrepreneur may want to investigate.

The dramatic cloud photo is by Sideshow Bruce, from Flickr Creative Commons.

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The most important tech resolution you can make for 2012 is: I Will Use Secure Passwords.

(You are already backing up, right? So we don’t need to cover that one, right?)

Many of our clients’ emails, domains, and website logins have been hacked this year, and the problem is only going to get worse. Protect yourself!

Promise yourself that by the end of January, you’ll change your Gmail password, your bank login password, your GoDaddy password, and all other important website logins to secure passwords.

A secure password is as follows:

1. Not the same as any other password.
2. Has uppercase and lowercase letters.
3. Has numbers (and symbols too, ideally).
4. Is 10 characters or more.

If you’re worried about forgetting all your new, complicated passwords, use a program such as 1Password to store them.

Make secure passwords your tech priority for this first month of 2012.

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This “quadricopter” is controlled by your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or Android phone, and its built-in video camera shows you what it sees in real time. $300.

Sennheiser and Adidas come together to create these sweatproof, durable, lightweight headphones. $70.

These tiny electronic blocks communicate with each other when lined up side by side, so you can play games, solve brain teasers, create music, and even design your own games. $150.