Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad

Watch and learn as Joe Kissell explains how to work with your iPad!

And now for something different... You want to work quickly and productively on your iPad, but it's hard to choose apps and services, and everything changes too fast even for an ebook. Instead, come up to speed by joining iPad expert Joe Kissell in four live online video presentations about how to make the most of your iPad for common business tasks. Once you buy your season pass, you'll get a PDF containing virtual tickets to four presentations that you can view in your Web browser. All four presentations have already been recorded, so you can watch them immediately. There's no need to take notes, since your season pass - currently 56 pages! - contains the key information from each show.

Read on for the topics that Joe has covered! Along with the live Q&A sessions, each show after the first has coverage of important updates to topics in previous shows.

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Contents & Intro
FAQ
Viewer Comments
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Show #1: The Three Rs (Recorded on Thursday, December 6th, 2012.)
Find out how to take notes, handle word processing, crunch numbers, and create and give presentations on an iPad. Also, see tricks for inputting text, whether by typing, dictating, or handwriting with a stylus.

"Today alone was worth much more than the subscription cost." —Tom P, after the first show.

"[This session had a] Good summary on the difficult question of iPad versus laptop. Also, I’d never before absorbed the possibility of getting apostrophes or quotes without changing the keyboard." —E.S.

Show #2: Deal with Documents (Recorded on Saturday, January 12th, 2013)
Discover how to move documents to and from your iPad using iTunes, in-app Wi-Fi options, Dropbox, and other cloud options. Along with Office documents, Joe will focus on PDFs, showing you how to create and annotate PDFs, fill out forms, and add your signature to a PDF. Joe will also talk about scanning paper with an iPad camera and performing OCR (optical character recognition). The presentation wraps up with a quick look at how to print from an iPad.

"Joe was great yesterday! That session was just packed with information I need to know NOW. And what a great bonus to also receive a PDF as a follow-up! In my humble opinion, this double-whammy takes you guys to the head of the pack."
—R.G., after the second show.

Show #3: Thanks for Sharing (Recorded on Wednesday, February 6th, 2013)
This show is all about collaboration. Joe demonstrated how to control a computer's screen from an iPad, whether that computer is the one on your desk or a virtual machine in the cloud. He also spoke about how to handle videoconferencing, share virtual whiteboards, and participate in collaborative text editing. And, the show ended with a discussion of how to make a secure Internet connection with a VPN (virtual private network), whether to a corporate VPN server or as an individual.

Show #4: Parts and Pieces (Recorded on Saturday, March 2nd, 2013)
In this final show, Joe pulled together various aspects of working with an iPad that didn't fit elsewhere. He covered a few power tips for the Safari Web browser, Web browsers that provide screen space for other activities, databases, project management tools, and apps that help you swipe credit cards, run a cash register, and manage a checkbook.

"Your books are terrific, but they're even better with the video!"—G.M., after the fourth show.

Book Info

56 pages
Version 1.4
Updated Feb 07, 2013
982K download
ISBN: 9781615424160
Free sample with Table of Contents, Intro, Quick Start, and section starts.

iPad & Kindle

An EPUB is not currently available for this title.

A Mobipocket file is not currently available for this title.

About the Author

Kissell, Joe headshot Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS and a Senior Contributor to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.

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Read Me First
Introduction
Getting Started Video
Show #1: The Three Rs
Show #2: Deal with Documents
Show #3: Thanks for Sharing
Show #4: Parts and Pieces
About This Season Pass

Read Me First

This series of live video presentations shows you how to use your iPad for a wide variety of work-related activities. It also helps you understand how to think about your iPad and be more productive with apps and accessories from Apple and third parties. It was written and performed by Joe Kissell, with editing and production assistance by Adam Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Introduction

Welcome to the very first Take Control Live series! You now have a virtual ticket—we’re calling it a season pass—to a series of four online presentations that will provide you with a wealth of information about getting real work done with your iPad. Not only that, but you’ll be able to ask questions during the presentations and provide feedback, shaping the way the series evolves.

If you’ve ever read a Take Control ebook, prepare for an entirely different experience. Although you may be reading these words in a PDF file, what you’ve purchased is not an ebook! Take Control Live is a series of live, Web-based video presentations that, taken together, cover approximately the same type and amount of subject matter as one of my ebooks. (If you’re unable to attend a live show, or if you want to review it later, you can watch a recording after the fact, or listen to the recorded audio.) But unlike static books, these presentations are dynamic and interactive. And because they’re spaced out over several months, I can update you with the very latest information as we go.

And what about this document you’re now reading? Think of it as prepackaged “class notes”—a digital handout of sorts to accompany the presentations. (More on this in a moment.)

I’ve given presentations for years at venues such as Macworld/iWorld, MacMania cruises, and Mac user groups. When I can’t be there in person, I appear live via streaming video. But this is the first time we’ve packaged an entire Take Control title in video form. We’ve been talking about doing this for years, but it was this particular topic—working with your iPad—that finally persuaded us to take the plunge.

Here’s the story:

When Apple announced the first iPad in 2010, the Take Control crew realized immediately that it was going to be a big deal. After some discussion, we decided that we’d start with a series of four books about this magical new product. Mine, which was called Take Control of Working with Your iPad, was intended to focus on the iPad’s productivity uses (others addressed basics, media, and networking), but in practice it turned out to be Take Control of Nearly Everything about Your iPad That Our Other Books Didn’t Cover. Which was a lot!

Less than a year later, I wrote a second edition of the book, which covered not only changes from Apple (such as iOS 4) but also a rapidly growing number of third-party apps. It was a huge undertaking, but almost as soon as we published the book, it was out of date. Not only did the app landscape change rapidly, but Apple kept updating iOS and the iPad hardware as well. As iPad sales skyrocketed, new work-related uses appeared almost daily. I kept a running list of things I learned about that would have to change in a third edition of the book, but even as that list grew to an astonishing length, other projects kept pushing their way to the front of my queue.

When I finally got to the point where I could focus on a new edition, I took a long, hard look at the existing book and my growing list of needed modifications. After several days of trying to retrofit the new material into the existing structure, I had to admit defeat. Because things had changed so profoundly, the only way to do justice to the subject matter would be to rewrite the entire book from scratch. I could do that, but it was obvious that I’d encounter the same problem again. A few months later, we’d see another new version of iOS, another generation of the iPad, and thousands of new apps. Keeping a book—even an ebook—up to date with all that material was going to require more writing, editing, and production time than any of us could afford.

After several long conversations, Adam and Tonya Engst and I decided that in order to cover this material properly, a conventional ebook wasn’t adequate—we needed an entirely new vehicle. And this—Take Control Live—is what we came up with!

So, what exactly is this, and how will it work? It’s pretty simple:

In the pages that follow, you’ll find descriptions of each of the four presentations that comprise Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad. Two presentations have already taken place, so you’ll see a Play button and the show notes. For the rest, you’ll find the planned dates and times, Play buttons, and lists of topics we plan to cover. (The lists of topics are preliminary—part of the point of spacing out the presentations is to enable us to adapt as new information appears.)
If you have a question about the material I plan to cover in a future presentation, do ask it. To send your question, click the Feedback button on the cover page of this season pass (if you are asked to log in, you can either do so, with your email address and Take Control password, or just close the dialog without logging in). If it’s feasible, I’ll work the answer into the presentation—and if not, I’ll do my best to answer it separately.
If you join a presentation as it’s broadcast, you’ll see and hear live video of me in your Web browser, along with anything that I show you from the screen of my Mac or iPad (such as demonstrations of important apps or a Keynote presentation). You’ll also be able to carry on a text-based chat with the other participants and ask additional questions that a moderator will collect—and that I’ll attempt to answer (time permitting) at the end of each presentation.
If you can’t attend a live presentation—or if you want to review the material we covered—no worries! They’ll all be recorded, so you can view each show after the fact, or you can listen to an audio version.
After each presentation, we’ll distribute an updated version of this very document you’re now reading. (We’ll send you an email message with a download link to the update, or you can click Check for Updates on the cover page of this season pass to download it.) That new version will include detailed notes about what I discussed (so you need not worry about taking notes yourself) and links to information about all the apps and other products I mentioned.

By the time we’ve finished with the four hour-long presentations, you’ll have seen and heard about the same amount of information that you would get from one of my ebooks. But it’ll be fresher, and—I hope—more relevant to your needs and interests since you can influence what I cover. If there’s sufficient interest, we might decide to create a follow-up series of presentations to cover iPad productivity developments in the future. But no promises yet—we’ll see how it goes.

Although we’ve put lots of effort into making this video series interesting and useful, it’s new territory for us. We might encounter technical… surprises. And frankly, we don’t know how you, our audience, will react. If you love it, this could be the first of many Take Control Live events, which will supplement our traditional ebooks. And if not, well, it will have been a fascinating experiment!

One last thing. If you’re new to the iPad, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Tonya Engst’s Take Control of Your iPad, which acquaints you with all the basics and covers lots of material that I won’t have time to address in this series (it’s being updated for iOS 6 right now).

What are the hardware and software requirements for watching a Take Control Live presentation?

You should be able to watch the presentations live on any Mac or PC running a major Web browser such as Safari, Firefox, or Google Chrome. Because the underlying technology, Google Hangouts on Air, is still undergoing changes, we can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to watch the presentations live on an iOS device (it seems to work in the Google Chrome Web browser for iOS, but only there), but you can use your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to watch the recorded presentations after the fact.

Do I have the right iPad?

Yes! In this series of four video presentations, all iPads are included. So, whether you have an original, mini, 2nd-, 3rd-, or 4th-generation iPad, that's fine. Joe is going to assume that you are running iOS 6, if possible on your iPad. If you have an original iPad, you can't upgrade past iOS 5, and that's okay. (If you are still running iOS 4, it's time for an upgrade!)

Will there be an EPUB or Mobipocket version of the season pass?

At the moment, we're not planning to create them, since it's extra work for no real gain—the main point of the season pass is to give you the virtual tickets and you can click the necessary links in a PDF on any platform. Once the final presentation is completed, we will make an EPUB of the final version of the season pass. That way, folks who prefer an EPUB can have it in that format at the end of the series.

Is there a blooper reel?

Why yes, there is!

Why the spartan look of the first episode?

Following the premiere of the first episode of the Take Control Live series, Joe Kissell packed up the remaining assets of the Take Control media complex in Paris, France, in preparation for his move to Southern California later this month. Show #1 of the series, “The Three R’s,” which was webcast on Thursday, 6 December, 2012, was produced under unusually difficult conditions, with the bulk of the media complex already on a ship steaming toward the Western Hemisphere. When asked why he was relocating, Joe responded (entirely in this reporter’s mind), “The bread and pastries in Paris are fantastic, but have you ever tried to find a good chile relleno here?” Subsequent episodes of Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad will be webcast from Joe's new Take Control media center in Southern California.

the ad hoc studio used for the final Parisian production

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