Pixelglow Software

Continuing our focus on business apps for the iPad, today we look at tools for visualizing data and information. The iPad's interface begs to be used for manipulating visual information, and it certainly delivers. And if you're used to creating charts and diagrams at your desk with Microsoft Excel or Visio, these five apps will deliver comparable tools that you can use from anywhere. Numbers is the spreadsheet application Apple's iWork suite. The iPad version, like the desktop version (and most spreadsheet applications), can create various types of charts and visualizations from data within spreadsheets. OmniGraffle is an iPad app for building charts, diagrams and other visualizations. It's pretty expensive at $49.99, but it has a dedicated following. It's also available for OSX. OmniGraphSketcher is a cheaper alternative priced at $14.99. We also covered Roambi Visualizer in our round-up of business intelligence tools for the iPad. It can visualize data from sources such as SAP Business Objects, SAP Crystal Reports, IBM Cognos, Excel and Salesforce.com. The free version only works with Excel, CSV files and HTML. The pro version, which costs $99 a year per user, adds support for Google Docs and Salesforce.com. Pricing varies for the enterprise edition, which offers support for many more formats. On the lower end, Easy Chart HD is a simple and inexpensive ($.99) way to create and share bar, line, pie and sidebar charts. For those just looking for a way to organize concepts, thoughts and ideas on the go, Instaviz is a diagramming app for building flowcharts and mindmaps. Read More

by This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Meetings and presentations are a way of life in the business world. That said, there’s nothing worse than dragging around a bunch of files and equipment to meetings. It would be so nice to have everything that’s necessary for a presentation or meeting stores in one place. And if that one place was a thin and lightweight piece of technology — like an iPad — it would be even better. Every organization has its own definition of formal and informal meetings and presentations, depending upon its corporate culture, clients and individual responsibilities. Whether it’s a structured sales presentation or a casual brainstorming session, here are some iPad apps that help you do everything for a presentation, from creating slides to taking minutes. Keep in mind that many of these apps allow you to transmit what is displayed on the iPad screen to a TV or projector — all you need are the appropriate cables, which are available in the Apple Store. And, pairing these apps up with your favorite file storage app such as Box.net or Dropbox will only add to your productivity. What iPad apps are you currently using during meetings? Leave us your suggestions in the comments. 1 of 12 Keynote is part of the Apple iWork suite. The app offers a tutorial to explain how to create a presentation file, but Keynote is very intuitive and user-friendly. There are only a handful of themes to choose from, but they are all classic and aesthetically pleasing. Keynote offers standard editing capabilities, including animation. It is also compatible with PowerPoint, so you can open and edit PowerPoint files -- and the presentation can be emailed in Keynote, PDF or PowerPoint formats. If you need to include charts or tables, you can purchase Numbers and Pages, the other productivity apps in the iWork suite. Cost: $9.99 1 Power Presenter lets you display a presentation (Keynote and PowerPoint included) that's been converted to a PDF file. There are two ways to open the PDF file on your iPad -- you can upload it via the file sharing function in iTunes or you can upload it from an email by holding down the attachment icon. Once the file is uploaded, you can present it, mark on slides using Read More

By Arron Hirst on December 4th, 2009 Pixelglow release the next version of Instaviz for iPhone. This version adds a bunch of new features into the mix, including an entirely re-vamped visual display architecture. We love Instaviz. In fact, we reviewed it in full back in January of this year proclaiming how good it actually was. Imagine a white board .. and then imagine all that creative power, in your pocket. You don’t need to bring anything with you. Simply you, your ideas, your thought-process, and .. your finger. Closely compared to the likes of Microsoft’s Visio, and based off the concept of Graphviz, an existing and open source software package which achieves more or less the same results, Instaviz is dubbed ‘graph creation software’ and it very cleverly uses the iPhone’s mutli-touch interface to harness the manipulation of mind-map environments. A few weeks back now, Glen of Instaviz gave us the heads up on an update to the software Version 1.5. This new version sees a variety of new features added, some which were needed, and others which are just nice to have. The more noteworthy is this version includes an entirely new display architecture. It sounds fancy, but we’re basically told that this means that the zooming, panning and placement of objects is faster, smoother, and more reliable. Still all part of this new architecture, in 1.5 Pixelglow added animation, meaning now, any and all objects which you create morph into their final shapes, and once an item is deleted – it fades out. The update also adds two-finger panning and zooming in ‘Edit’ mode, Batch file operations in Graphs list, and complete help files and localizations in 10 languages. They’re small changes, but ones which I’m sure will make a difference. “One of our goals with this update has been to make scrolling and zooming within Instaviz 1.5 so intuitive and smooth that you don’t notice you’re working on a small screen.” As well as all that, they’ve also rejigged the sharing aspect of Instaviz, meaning you can now carry out features like export, duplicate delete and preview in one tidy interface, at graph level. Finally though, and probably most excitingly, is this verison adds the future foundations for Instaviz 2.0, with this verison introducing the ability to in-line edit, as well as adding CoverFlow-like views for your graphs. INSTAVIZ 1.5 GIVEAWAY Instaviz 1.5 is already available on Read More

When you were young, the grown-ups used to catch you doodling little circles and lines on the back of your exercise books or paper napkins, instead of paying attention to what they said. They didn’t realize that you need to sketch things out, how they relate to other things, in order to get them into your head and other people’s heads. Sketch a rough shape with your finger and Instaviz transforms what you drew in a split second. Sketch a link between two shapes and Instaviz quickly redraws the graph with the best layout. No pesky user interface getting in the way of your brainstorm! Read More