Two recent articles elaborate on iAnnotate’s usefulness for students and teachers in high school, college, and beyond.

Tracy at iOS Affairs uses iAnnotate to plow through articles in her graduate mental health counseling program. She touts iAnnotate’s ability to perform tasks previously impossible on paper, like voice and photo annotations, custom stamps, and typewriter notes in multiple colors and fonts. Tracy adds “watch for updates from these developers. They’re full of surprises. As soon as I think the app is perfect, they improve it with things I hadn’t even imagined but soon find indispensable.” Well, shucks, Tracy. We like you too.

Kristi Upson-Saia at Occidental College discusses the benefits of iAnnotate for grading assignments. She uses custom stamps like “develop this idea” and “awkward prose” to quickly mark issues throughout the document. She writes more substantive comments at the end of the paper, and refers back to her earlier stamps to provide guidance. For Kristi, this process “saves an inordinate amount of time grading.” Kristi doesn’t say what she does with all this extra time, but it’s safe to assume she’s fighting widespread corruption or nursing wounded animals back to health.

Huge thanks go out to both writers.

We continue to come across so many different uses for iAnnotate PDF. If I were to imagine iAnnotate as a person, our app would be a globe-trotting adventurer who has mastered just about every field. Take a look at few of these escapades:

iAnnotate on Archaeological Digs
“Ever see a crew chief or field director carry around a 2 in three-ring binder full of reference materials? Mine is about 1 cm thick, weighs 1.3 pounds, and is shiny. Beat that.”

iAnnotate Practicing Rural Medicine in Australia
“In fact you can quickly and easily search through all your documents for key words within, or for tags you’ve added (this has come in handy on more than a few occasions when a consultant has asked me a tricky question, but I can search for the topic and pull up part of one of the many textbooks I have sitting in my library).”

iAnnotate Grading Term Papers in Philadelphia
“As a result, I was able to write onscreen comments, usually in red, as well as add typed longer comments, and to return the papers immediately. This was satisfying to both students and to instructor.”

iAnnotate Handing Down the Law in Florida
“In case you were wondering, the judges use iAnnotate to annotate documents. The iPads were provided by the Court. And they all have them!”

Download it from the store!

We caught this today on twitter. Soledad O’Brien, host of CNN’s Starting Point and loving mother, has downloaded iAnnotate PDF upon the recommendation of her 11-year-old daughter. My colleague Matthew (@Branchfire) followed up on twitter, and it appears that the younger Ms. O’Brien uses iAnnotate PDF in her 5th grade class.

In cases like this, it’s always good to defer to the professionals. Mss. O’Brien and O’Brien, we thank you.

Mother Nature Network has a few posts about television actors going paperless with iAnnotate PDF. David James Elliott, who stars in ABC’s upcoming GCB and formerly on JAG, chose iAnnotate PDF as his go-to app for reading and studying scripts. Matt Ryan, who stars in “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior,” also uses iAnnotate and mentions the benefit of sharing his scripts and notes via email.

Thanks for the praise, Messrs. Elliott and Ryan. If either of you are in desperate need of a talented extras to walk by on camera or sip coffee in the background of a scene, you can count on us.

We were thrilled to see Apple’s business case study on Fennemore Craig, Arizona’s oldest law firm and a recent iPad convert. Fennemore Craig highlights their appreciation of iAnnotate PDF, and they echo the compliments we’ve heard from other users in law. They’ve eliminated boxes of paper exhibits and reduced overhead. They discovered instant back-up and archiving of documents. They’ve increased their coolness by strolling into mediation sessions with just an iPad under their arm.

Mark Strauss, a screenwriter and blogger, notified us to a response he wrote about printing and proofreading screenplays. Traditionalists have recommended hammering out scripts on typewriters, xeroxing, and marking up the stacks of paper. Mark, on the other hand, embraced the age and purchased iAnnotate PDF, which was “the best sawbuck [he] ever spent.”

It took him only a few minutes to adjust to using a stylus, and he soon found it much better and so much more forgiving. Now he marks up, highlights, proofreads, and shares his edited screenplays with only a few taps. This is “extremely valuable for professionals and aspiring writers active in screenwriting groups.” On a recent trip to Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, he proofread 90% of a script, most of which he did poolside with a cup of rich Mexican coffee.

Thank you for the kind words, Mr. Strauss. If we ever cross paths in Nuevo Vallarta, I will buy you a piña colada.

We were very pleased to find the above video on the Wall Street Journal’s video site. Dow Jones’ Caitlin Nish interviewed financial advisors about their favorite apps, and iAnnotate PDF made the list. Our app is also a favorite among the successful, charming, and generally well-liked. The last sentence was sourced from a series of unpublished interviews I conducted with my bathroom mirror.

Thanks for the video, Ms. Nish!

My colleague Matthew forwarded me this today. This went under our radar last year, but it was too well-written and thorough for me to ignore.

The writer at Fleegle’s Blog has an in-depth guide to using iAnnotate as an interactive knitting assistant. She clearly lays out her process and describes how she applied our flexible app to downloading and organizing patterns, managing suggested yarn types, monitoring stitch counts, and communicating with designers.

I don’t claim to be a knitter (in fact, I can barely use chopsticks), but if I were, I’m sure I’d spend a lot of time on Fleegle’s informative blog. Thanks for the post, Fleegle!

We always love hearing about creative or little known uses of our app. If you have one that you’d like to share with us, please shoot me an email at tony[-at-]branchfire[-dot-]com.