CDPUG BlogSphere

“Take Control of PDFpen 6″ explains PDFpen for Mac and iOS

Have you ever had wanted to fill out and sign a PDF-based form without printing it and faxing it back? Or wanted to change the date on a PDF-based flyer? Needed to give feedback on a PDF, but stumbled around trying to insert comments and proofreading marks? Wished you could perform optical character recognition on a scanned document so you could revise the text right in the PDF? For such tasks, we generally turn to Smile’s PDFpen, which can perform most common PDF manipulations more easily than Adobe Acrobat Pro, and at a fraction of the price. (You can learn more about PDFpen at http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/ and read on to learn how to save 20% on its purchase).

As massively useful as PDFpen is, working with PDFs – regardless of the app – can be complex, which is why we’re happy to throw a clarifying light on the topic with our latest title, “Take Control of PDFpen 6.” Written by Michael E. Cohen, who was first briefed by Adobe about the technology before it was even called PDF, the 177-page ebook explains precisely what you can do with PDFpen 6 and its big brother, PDFpenPro 6, plus Smile’s mobile versions, PDFpen for iPad and PDFpen for iPhone. “Take Control of PDFpen 6″ normally costs $10, but the 30% MUG discount drops that to $7. Learn more about the book via the coupon-loaded link below.

http://tid.bl.it/tco-pdfpen6-mug-discount

After a whirlwind history and overview of the PDF format sets you on the right track, Michael walks you through PDFpen’s tools and navigation, along with the many ways you can create a PDF from within the program. You’ll learn how to take notes on a PDF, copyedit and comment on a PDF, fill out PDF forms (complete with your signature!), add and remove pages, and edit text and graphics in a PDF. You’ll even find out how export a PDF to a formatted Microsoft Word document. For PDFpenPro users, Michael explains how to create an interactive PDF form and get the user-submitted data back via email or the Web, plus how to control whether a PDF can be printed, modified, annotated, and more. An appendix describes the many useful AppleScripts that ship with PDFpen.

Specific things you’ll learn include how to:

* Figure out whether to buy PDFpen or PDFpenPro, and what features you do (or do not) get depending on if you buy from Smile or from the Mac App Store.

* Scan a document to PDF and make the text editable with OCR.

* Use professional editing marks and add comments.

* Combine pages from multiple files into a single PDF.

* Fill out a PDF form with ease.

* Remove sensitive or confidential text from a PDF.

* Add a signature to a PDF – and store it in PDFpen’s Library for future use.

* Add page and URL links to a PDF.

* Use (or turn off) OS X’s Auto Save and Version features.

* Turn a Web site into a multi-page PDF (PDFpenPro only).

* Make a clickable table of contents for a PDF (PDFpenPro only).

* Store PDFs in iCloud for access from any of your Apple devices (Mac App Store versions only).

* Go mobile with PDFpen for iPad and PDFpen for iPhone, with a special focus on moving PDFs in and out of PDFpen—Michael describes several approaches, including iCloud, iTunes, Dropbox, and Open In.

We created this ebook in collaboration with Smile and worked with PDFpen’s developers during the tech edit process to ensure that the book is accurate.

Note that members of Take Control’s sister publication, TidBITS, can save 20% on all Smile products purchased through the Smile cart. To learn about joining TidBITS, visit http://tidbits.com/member_benefits.html. To access the coupon code, make sure you’ve logged in and visit http://tidbits.com/your_benefits.html.

cheers… -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

Please share “Take Control of Your iPad, Second Edition” with a friend!

We’re pleased to bring you our latest ebook, “Take Control of Your iPad, Second Edition,” written by our intrepid editor-in-chief Tonya Engst to help you get more delight from any iPad running iOS 6. Although this guide has something for nearly any iPad user, some advanced iPad users may not see it as necessary – but if that’s true of you, we bet you know someone who does need it. So, as you’ll see below, we think that you should buy a copy and share it with a less-geeky friend or relative. (Encouraging sharing? From a book publisher? Can you imagine!) The book normally costs $15, but the 30% MUG discount drops that to $10.50. Learn more about the book via the coupon-loaded link below.

http://tid.bl.it/your-ipad-mug-discount

Why, you may ask, put significant effort into completing a 226-page ebook that’s guaranteed to be obsolete in a year? Tonya has struggled with that question over the past weeks, particularly as she sat down to write each weekend day for the last month.

What she realized is that the answer is a single word: Delight. She wants you – and your close friend or relation – to be delighted with the iPad. Many people can use the iPad well enough, but aren’t having the amazing experience they should be. They sell themselves short. They can’t find their stuff. They scroll laboriously when they could tap to navigate. They put up with a cacophony of noisy notifications. They miss important email messages. They watch video on the iPad when they could stream it to an Apple TV. They need help… even if they don’t realize that they do.

You may already be delighted with your iPad. But, maybe you still want a good reference book. Or, perhaps you’re aware that there’s always more to learn. Either way, this ebook has answers.

We’re doing something a little different with “Take Control of Your iPad, Second Edition.” Consider your purchase a two-fer. Buy “Take Control of Your iPad, Second Edition” for yourself, but make a copy and give it to the less-geeky person in your life who _really_ needs it. We’re serious about this – our goal is to help people with technology, and the best way we know to do that is to get them to read what we write.

Here’s a sampling of the many ways this ebook aims to increase iPad delight:

* Remind yourself of the fun four- and five-fingered gestures.
* Sort out the many different ways to turn down the volume.
* Start using Siri to tell your iPad what to do (introduced-in-2012 iPads only).
* Fill out your “card” in Contacts and autofill your contact info when shopping.
* Create a calendar – and share it with other people.
* Finally get iTunes syncing working the way you want it to.
* Use the easy drag-down Notification Center – and even tweet from it.
* Explore iTunes U – it’s like going to college, but without the deadlines.
* Sync Safari tabs, read later items, and bookmarks with iCloud.
* Get expert tips for a successful Home screen organization.
* Lull yourself to sleep with an audio recording, and wake to your favorite music.

http://tid.bl.it/your-ipad-mug-discount

Thanks for your questions, comments, and kind support – readers like you make it possible for a small independent publisher like us to bring you the Take Control series.

cheers… -Adam Engst, Take Control publisher

Introducing “Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad”

Adam Engst here. You know all those iPads that you and 100 million other people have bought? Lots of people want to use an iPad to go beyond browsing Web pages, watching videos, and reading books, to replace a laptop and get real work done. We’ve been helping people do just that for years, with several editions of Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Working with Your iPad.” But we’ll be honest – the field is exploding, and a new ebook would be out-of-date the week it was released.

So we’re embarking on an experiment to bring you the same meticulously researched, real-world information that you’re accustomed to getting from Joe, but in a different way. Instead of publishing hundreds of pages of text accompanied by static screenshots, we’re going to give you Joe himself, live and in person. Or rather, he’ll be live and in your Web browser, doing show-and-tell with his trusty iPad over the next four months.

That’s the premise behind “Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad.” In each of four live online video presentations – the first of which is coming soon, on December 6th! – Joe will convey the same details he would have put in a book, but he’ll supplement them with live demos, answers to your questions, and updates on previously covered topics. You can read more about what Joe will be covering at the page linked below, plus see a trailer video and purchase your season pass.

http://tid.bl.it/tcl-working-with-your-ipad-mug-discount

Those who buy the season pass can watch upcoming presentations live and ask questions, or tune in any time afterward. There’s no need to take notes, since we’ll update the season pass PDF after each show with concise notes and links to everything that Joe covers. So you’ll end up with not only four hours of video, but also the distilled essence of a Take Control ebook.

We’re approaching this experiment with some trepidation, since Joe, Tonya, and I have been learning new skills en route to what is essentially a public performance. We’re accustomed to putting our effort in up front and presenting you with the polished product, but with Take Control Live, we’re stepping out on a high wire.

So if you’re interested in learning how to get work done on an iPad, please come watch Joe and me juggle iPads on our metaphorical tightrope. We may not be Cirque du Soleil, but I can promise a good show exceeding anything we’d do at a conference costing hundreds of dollars, all in the comfort of your own home. For “Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad,” we’re charging $49.99, but through the end of December 5th, 2012, we’re offering the season pass for half price: only $24.99. And, to sweeten the deal even further, the 30% MUG discount drops the price to only $17.49, again, through December 5th, after which it will be $34.99.

http://tid.bl.it/tcl-working-with-your-ipad-mug-discount

As always, if you’re unsatisfied at any time, we’ll happily refund your money, though I won’t promise “no questions asked” because I can never restrain myself from trying to learn more about what we could have done better.

Thank you for your support of Take Control, and we hope to see you in the audience for our first Take Control Live presentation on Thursday, December 6th!

cheers… -Adam Engst, Take Control publisher

Take Control of iBooks Author with a new ebook by Michael E. Cohen

Intrigued by Apple’s new, free iBooks Author ebook publishing software? If you want to create a visually attractive ebook on your Mac and have your layout preserved for readers in iBooks on the iPad, you’ll find a lot to like in iBooks Author. Beyond the obvious text formatting, you can insert slideshows and interactive illustrations, add audio and video, create quiz questions, and much more. iBooks Author is designed for creating textbooks, but with a little creativity, you can use it to make many other types of interactive multimedia iPad publications as well, including catalogs, journals, brochures, and more.

Our curiosity about iBooks Author has taken form as “Take Control of iBooks Author,” a new ebook by Michael E. Cohen. You couldn’t imagine a more appropriate author than Michael, who helped create some of the first digital textbooks as part of the Voyager Expanded Books series in the 1990s and wrote the user guide for the original Voyager Expanded Book Toolkit. We’ve also contributed what we can from our hard-won experience publishing in the iBookstore. The 150-page book normally costs $15, but the 30% MUG discount drops that to $10.50. Learn more about the book via the coupon-loaded link below, and if you know any educators with iPads, we’d really appreciate it if you could pass this message to them – we’re happy to extend this discount to your teacher friends.

http://tid.bl.it/tco-ibooks-author-mug-discount

Briefly, “Take Control of iBooks Author” kicks off by explaining how to plan your Multi-Touch book project to fit the capabilities and assumptions made by iBooks Author. Next up, you’ll find comprehensive step-by-step instructions for producing your ebook by customizing the many available layouts and arranging your text and media. Finally, you’ll learn how to publish your ebook, whether for distribution on Apple’s iBookstore or through some other means. The topics that discuss production are extremely detailed – click the link above this paragraph to learn more about what’s covered.

We chose to publish “Take Control of iBooks Author” in our usual PDF and EPUB formats (Mobipocket coming soon), so you could be read it on many different devices and so it would be a regular Take Control ebook. However, we also wanted to publish an actual Multi-Touch book, so we put several chapters (about 40 pages) from “Take Control of iBooks Author” into a free Multi-Touch book called “Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author.” When viewing “Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author” on your iPad, the media examples are fully operational – you can play a video file, view an image gallery, tap an interactive illustration, take a visual quiz, see the Keynote widget, rotate a 3D image, and even make a Cheshire cat fade away.

To read “Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author,” you can download it on your iPad and then tap the “Open in” controls to move it into iBooks, or you can download it to your Mac (or Windows PC) and sync it to iBooks via iTunes. We hope that this free ebook will be shared widely and that it will encourage people – especially educators – who may have never bought a Take Control title before to check out “Take Control of iBooks Author.”

http://tid.bl.it/tco-getting-ready-for-ibooks-author

As always, thank you for your support of the Take Control series!

cheers… -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

“Take Control of Your iPad” v1.1 updated for iPad 3 and iOS 5.1

With the third-generation iPad and iOS 5.1, Apple continues to enhance the iPad experience, and while it’s easy to turn the iPad on and tap around, becoming fluent with its features and making the most of its capabilities can take time and practice, especially given how hard it can be to find the right setting (such as silencing notification sounds from particular apps). To help you optimize your iPad experience (or to help a friend or relative when you don’t want to be on call for every question), we’ve just released the 1.1 version of Tonya Engst’s “Take Control of Your iPad,” completely updated for the third-generation iPad and all the changes in iOS 5.1. The 188-page ebook is available for only $10.50 after the 30% MUG discount:

http://tid.bl.it/your-ipad-mug-discount

“Take Control of Your iPad” is designed to work at two levels. The person just getting started will learn about the special hardware components in the iPad, take a tour of the parts and ports on the edge of the iPad, and find tips on key accessories. Tonya provides advice on how best to answer questions asked by the Setup Assistant – including Location Services, Wi-Fi and cellular data Internet connections, Apple ID, iCloud, and Voice Dictation – plus assistance with setting up services that the Setup Assistant doesn’t handle, including the passcode lock, Bluetooth and tethered connections, notifications, and an effective custom iTunes sync. The book also has real-world advice on buying and managing third-party apps.

On the other hand, if you have your iPad up and running already, the rest of the book helps you master core iPad apps such as Contacts, Photos, iBooks, Music, and Safari. So, for instance, you’ll learn how to change contact labels and add Birthday and Related People fields in Contacts, how to sync your Google calendars and contacts to your iPad, how to configure which categories appear in your Spotlight searches, how to work with Photo Stream, which formats and transfer methods work with the Videos app, and more.

Among much else, you’ll find answers to these common questions:

* What is Location Services, and is it okay if I turn it on?
* Should I back up to iCloud or to iTunes?
* How do I set up a Wi-Fi iTunes sync?
* How do I quit an app?
* How can I use AirPlay to stream music and video around my house?
* How can I type more effectively on the virtual keyboard?
* How do I share my purchased apps with family members?
* How do I set up notifications and control the sounds they make?
* What are smart techniques for organizing my Home screen?
* How do I organize my ebook library in iBooks?
* How can I make a playlist in Music?
* Should I turn on AutoFill in Safari?
* What is iTunes in the Cloud?

As always, thank you for your support of the Take Control series!

cheers… -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

Wacom has posted a video with tips on using their tablets. It’s a topic that I have wanted to make into a monthly program, but have not had the opportunity. Until that happens….check out this video.

http://vimeo.com/37426054

Spike Radway
CDPUG Director of Programming