When I finally said “Hasta la vista” to Windows some years back and embraced the Apple Macintosh as a way of life, one thing I left behind only with regret was my favourite portable scanner: the PaperPort Strobe. This was a beloved tool of any road warrior, manufactured by US company Visioneer (www.visioneer.com). It was the size of a French bread stick and the weight of a cricket ball, but could turn piles of paper into PDF files faster than Superman could leap tall buildings. The scanner came with software that was not available for Mac, so it eventually found a dignified place on that mountain of obsolete equipment that steadily grows in my garage.

It was therefore with enormous pleasure that I finally found a replacement this week which is lighter, faster and made for Mac – the just released Fujitsu ScanSnap s300M (www.fujitsu.com). The ScanSnap scans receipts, bank statements, letters and even business cards at lightning speed, but when used with database software such as DevonThink Pro (www.devon-technologies.com) it will also allow you to create searchable PDF versions of your scans. That is because it runs a built-in optical character recognition process. This puts Apple Mac users within reach of an affordable paperless office - and helps convert the boxes of tax records (which might otherwise perch next to that pile of obsolete equipment in your garage) into a simple folder on your hard disk.

Optical character recognition has been around for quite a while, but artificial intelligence now allows patterns to be recognized in graphics so that text strings, for example, can be picked out of photographs taken by a mobile phone. Such photos can be uploaded via NextG Wireless Broadband to network-based storage for multi-platform access, collaboration and sharing.

A good example of such a service is Evernote (www.evernote.com). Evernote will harvest photos and information from the Web, your camera-equipped mobile phone or your desktop. It then makes these available from just about anywhere, ensuring that even hand written text is converted into a searchable and editable form.

Evernote successfully converted into searchable text photos I took of reference books on the shelves at the local library. It did the same thing for the sign outside the library which displayed the branch’s opening hours and the sign at the tram stop listing the arrival schedule. Although the service is in Beta and the amount of data which can be saved on the network is currently limited to only 100MB, Evernote is a great example of a next-generation broadband service which uses fast broadband speeds, network-based storage and artificial intelligence to deliver real improvements in the convenience and usefulness of the information you encounter in day-to- day life. And it is available for both Windows and Mac, or simply via your browser.

While Evernote is a good example of a service which is platform agnostic, the same cannot be said of email. One of the challenges I faced when making the transition from Windows to Mac was how to convert gigabytes of Microsoft Outlook .pst mail files into a format which could be read by Microsoft Entourage (which is part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008), Apple Mail or even merely the Spotlight search capability built into OSX Leopard.

After trying several solutions, the one which seemed the fastest and most reliable was Emailchemy from the intriguingly named company, Weird Kid Software (www.weirdkid.com). My initial enthusiasm was dampened however, when I discovered the infamous winmail.dat problem (facstaff.gpc.edu) - refer to  Microsoft Help and Support (support.microsoft.com). This is a rather complex forest of pain which I don’t propose to bore you with, except to say that if you want to reliably access on a Mac large amounts of Outlook mail from multiple origins, your best path is to keep the .pst file in Outlook on a Windows machine and use the indexing and text retrieval software, X1 (www.x1.com) to retrieve what you are looking for.

If necessary, get access to the Windows machine from your Mac via Timbuktu Pro (www.netopia.com) - but don’t think you will be able to escape the thick tentacles of the winmail.dat problem easily, especially for .pst files that are extremely large and which comprise information where you can’t afford even one e-mail to be corrupted. The connoisseurs among you may point to apparent solutions to winmail.dat such as TNEF (www.joshjacob.com) but my research indicates this does not work reliably in OSX Leopard. They may also point out that Emailchemy has an embedded IMAP mail server which should do the trick because converted email can be imported from an IMAP server. But this is not really viable for commercially sensitive information.

So what we are seeing here is broadband’s increasing role as a de facto workaround solution for a growing range of everyday information and computing problems. Evernote uses broadband to assemble all your graphics information in one place, accessible from anywhere. Then it lets you take scanning to the next level, with better OCR, collaboration and graphics sharing than has ever been possible before.

Timbuktu Pro uses broadband to open the screen of another computer right on your own monitor so that you can operate the other computer as if you were in front of it, even though it might be in another city. By that means you can easily bridge, for example, the lingering gap between Windows and Mac created by incompatible mail formats - without spending an exasperating time wrestling with the migration details. Just take the best of both worlds.

You will, of course, see that I’m straining to put on a brave face here. Hopefully in the utopian future you ultimately won’t need to run two operating systems just to have access to your data. The announcement by Adobe this week of Acrobat.com points to another area in which document management is merging with the live conferencing and collaboration techniques made possible by broadband.

The PDF is a good example of a proprietary format which, even though it is proprietary, nonetheless is reliably accessible from multiple operating systems. It is a stark contrast to the Outlook .pst format. The new capabilities Adobe has announced in Acrobat version 9 (www.acrobat.com) will build on that capability, bringing some attractive office productivity functions into the so-called broadband network “cloud” and competing aggressively with products such as Google Docs, and indeed, BigPond’s own Office and DocBoss.

It is not yet clear how important all this will be to the profitability of aspirant media comms companies which seek to make money from value-added broadband services that solve these kinds of challenges with one click ease. But we can say with certainty that better broadband will remain a key part of your arsenal for solving a wide range of everyday computing challenges.