SmileOnMyMac Blog

I just got back Miami this week on a combination work/personal visit. I was born and raised here, and I never pass up a chance to come down to Florida during February.

I gave a presentation to the Gold Coast Mac Users Group, showing off PDFpen and DiscLabel primarily. Several members of the audience chimed in to share their happy SmileOnMyMac customer stories. What a fine and intelligent group!

I also gave a demo at the Apple Store at The Falls in South Miami. The demo coincided with the enormous power black-out that we had in Florida last week. The demo was postponed for the 45 minutes the power was out.

Apple Store customers are sure dedicated. Lots of people waited outside the store waiting for it to reopen. It was crowded almost before the computers had booted back up!

Last weekend, the Houston Area Apple Users Group held their annual day-long MacFest and SmileOnMyMac was one of the sponsors. I went down to demo our products at the MacFest and had a GREAT time. My first visit to Texas!

Lesa King, co-host of Your Mac Life and my pal, was one of the speakers, along with Andy Ihnatko, Bob LeVitus and Chris Breen. I learned a lot from listening in on their sessions. I also got to eat barbecue and Tex-Mex, of course. The HAAUG folks were really nice, and I especially loved meeting SmileOnMyMac customers who came up to me to tell me how much they loved our programs.

Lesa and I gave presentations at the Apple Store in the Houston Galleria, hers covering Digital Photography and mine about PDFpen. Since we were there at the store, I asked Lesa (who is a big fan of PDFpen) to pose for another entry in our gallery of Apple Store photos!

Here’s a photo at the Apple Store in the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, Washington, north of Seattle. Being Labor Day, we took my young friend Clara for some final back-to-school clothes shopping. I spotted the Apple Store, and Clara graciously posed for me.

Clara might not know what a PDF is, but she does know all about Macintosh, despite being raised in a PC household. She loves making little movies with me on my MacBook Pro, and she always asks to see the latest “Get-A-Mac” ads.

iPhone to the Rescue

Neither Clara’s mom (my best friend from college) nor I had ever been to the Alderwood Mall. We had no idea where anything was or even if we were in the right place when we first pulled into the parking lot. “Not a problem,” I said. “We’ll find the mall directory on the iPhone.” And we did. I pegged the cool meter with Clara, to boot. (Just don’t ask me to go back to Abercrombie & Fitch…)

C’mon, all you mall rats. Send photos of PDFpen at your local Apple Store to jean@smileonmymac.com – and get a free SmileOnMyMac app!

I decided to get a photo of PDFpen in the Apple Store–at the same time as I picked up an iPhone.

It was a fairly painless experience. My buddy Edward and I went over to Pioneer Place mall in downtown Portland at around 2 pm, and we were about 80th in line. What stunned me is that within a half an hour of the store opening at 6 pm, we had our iPhones and were out the door. The Apple Store was quick!

A few more photos are posted on Flickr.

So far, I think the iPhone is really neat! The activation via iTunes was a model of user-friendliness. Everything works pretty much as advertised. What would really make it great is some excellent third-party software programs.

That’s right, folks! You don’t have to shlep on the L.I.E. all the way to Manhattan to get your favorite PDF editing tool for the Mac. From our intrepid correspondent, George Canellis:

Newsflash! The retail box of PDFpen has been spotted in the Walt Whitman Apple Store in Huntington Station, New York! Here’s your product in the hands of yours truly, who just happens to be proudly wearing his official Your Mac Life hockey jersey which, as luck would have it, is sponsored by SmileOnMyMac. What a coincidence!!!

Congratulations on scoring some prime shelf real estate in our favorite retail store!!

Thanks, George! (George gets a free product from SmileOnMyMac, and you can too! Just send your Apple Store PDFpen photos to jean@smileonmymac.com. If we post your photo, you’ll get your choice of one of our great products.)

BTW, I’ll be coming to Long Island to speak to the Long Island Macintosh Users Group (LIMac) on October 12th.

Who knew that there was an Apple Store in Pentagon City? Who knew Pentagon City was in Arlington, VA? Our friend Patrick, that’s who:

More PDFpen photos! Here’s Jessica in the Apple Store in Palo Alto:

Sean and Andy at the Apple Store in NYC:

Going to the Apple Store to pick up one of those cute color iPod Shuffles? Look for PDFpen on the shelves, and take a photo we can post. Send them to jean@smileonmymac.com.

OK, we might be getting a little obsessed with this… I’m down in San Francisco getting ready for Macworld, and made a little visit to the Apple Store while shopping for booth supplies in Emeryville:

And here’s Greg in Corte Madera:

Watch this space. There will definitely be sightings at Macworld–PDFpen will be one of the goodies in the Macworld Speaker’s Gift Bags! And Dr. Bott will be selling the box at their booth. (S1912)

When you have out-of-town guests, where do you take them? The Apple Store, of course. Over the holidays, my colleague Greg took his parents to The Apple Stores in Pleasanton and Walnut Creek, California, and look what they found:

Send your PDFpen retail photos to jean@smileonmymac.com — if we post yours, you’ll get the SmileOnMyMac product of your choice with our compliments.

Recognizing that not everybody buys their software via online download, we decided to take the plunge into retail this year with PDFpen. We worked hard with our wonderful designers at Active Media Group to create a package design that would be fabulous and informative at the same time. The incredible folks at Agilaire Print and Packaging took us through the process of making that package a reality, and went the extra mile to help us neophytes. Now PDFpen is distributed by Dr. Bott and has made its way to the shelves of an Apple Store near you!

Here’s Philip at the Apple Store in San Francisco. Send us a photo of PDFpen in your Apple Store–if we post it on the blog, we’ll give you a free SmileOnMyMac download product of your choice.

Thanks to everyone who helped us make this idea into reality!