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 The last sentence was sourced from a series of unpublished interviews I conducted with my bathroom mirror.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.

Over the past month, these articles have mentioned iAnnotate’s use in local government and schools.

• Murfreesboro, TN City Council purchased 10 iPads with iAnnotate for its council members. Their hopes mirror the goals of every city that has gone this route: increased productivity, elimination of printing costs, and making the neighboring city councils simply green with tech-envy.
• Hudson Oaks, TX City Council follows suit: “The iAnnotate software that the council and staff will now use to view the agendas provides council with more advanced electronic reviewing tools than were available to them in a standard PDF reviewer on a laptop,” Campbell-Husband said. “When they make comments, note questions they need to ask, these are automatically saved in the downloaded agenda on the iPad, making it harder for a council member to inadvertently lose their electronic notes prior to a meeting.” The article provided no solution for council members who may inadvertently lose their iPads.
• Edgewood, TX School Board will receive iPads to cut down on over 600 pages of printed material for each board member. The article goes on to cite iAnnotate’s use by students in completing and submitting assignments at a local high school: “The ability to tag books electronically and email or print notes has been a wonderful addition to our learning environment.”

One of our licensees sent us this photo. They were intent on leaving behind the “huge binders of paper” they usually distribute at their annual assemblies and embracing a paperless existence. By licensing our library and software, they created a customized app that efficiently delivered the most up-to-date documents to their attendees. The attendees could annotate the material as they pleased and then email themselves the documents at the close of the session. Imagine the convenience of leaving a conference without the ubiquitous and immediately-forgotten tote bag full of pamphlets, info sheets, and novelty keychains.

This is just a single example of PDF Library in action. For more information on licensing our library for your own use, check out our library page. If you’re interested, you can sign up for an instant download of our demo library here and see if it fits your needs.

We missed this video when it was released earlier this year. The University of San Francisco distributed iPads to their faculty to record how their professors used the device. Associate Professor Dr. Evelyn Ho turned to iAnnotate to work through her summer research. She now keeps over seven hundred social science articles in iAnnotate’s document library, which has quite simply “saved [her] office… at school and at home from exploding.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Thank you for the kind words, Dr. Ho, and enjoy your paperless existence.

Geri L. Dreiling has written a terrific article about iAnnotate over on Lawyer Tech Review. She’s created a helpful tutorial on downloading cases to iAnnotate, marking them up, and then uploading the annotated case to her online storage for later review.

We’ve dubbed iAnnotate the paper eliminator, but this article points out that it eliminates highlighters too. I hadn’t considered that before, but I now estimate that iAnnotate has saved over 10,000 hectares of highlighters from harvest and subsequent shipping. That’s how highlighters are made, right? They’re plucked from the ground like stalks of asparagus?

Thanks for your detailed tutorial, Ms. Dreiling.

If iAnnotate has changed your workflow, shoot me an email and tell me how.

Hi! I closed this video by inviting you to another “trip into annotation.” I don’t exactly know what that is. Don’t be disappointed if it’s not fun.

This is what the first of a series of tutorials covering the finer aspects of iAnnotate . If you’ve ever had questions about signing documents in iAnnotate, this 2 minute tutorial should show you the way.

Enjoy!