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July 24, 2004
SilverStar - Entering Phase II of our product plan
For the past several weeks, I've been testing and experimenting with our alpha pre-release version of NoteTaker 1.9 (our OS X version). In many ways, this release will be like no other release we've ever done before. It marks an important milestone for AquaMinds and the team here because it fulfills one of the important product development foundation pieces we envisioned from day one as part of our SilverStar Technology Plan. In short, the SilverStar architecture has been and is all about delivering increasing value to our NoteTaker users via key technologies which will enable cross-platform functionality, enhanced performance and modular or component-based customization. For our company, is the natural evolution of NoteTaker transforming from a proprietary, standalone application into a programmable platform in order to extend, enhance and enrich user productivity.
NTML is XML (open, public and transparent)
Earlier this year, we delivered on an important piece of the SilverStar architecture (our Phase I) which has been our on-going support of XML as an open, publicly-available file format for moving data from NoteTaker notebooks to other applications called NTML (Note-Taking Markup Language). The "Export NTML" command was included several releases ago as a cross-platform file and data format to be used by developers and XML programmers for developing new XSLT plug-ins. This XML-based architecture allows us (and any programmer/company) to create user loadable plug-ins which extend and enhance NoteTaker as a cross-platform compatible data type. In time, you can expect there will be XSLTs to transform NTML to XHTML and even to WordML (Microsoft's Word for Windows-specific XML). NTML means open choices.
Our own NTML example is the Keynote XSLT we ship bundled which shows off how an outline and content within NoteTaker can easily be transformed to a native Keynote presentation document. Our NTML file output also means that irrespective of NoteTaker's shelf-life, users' data will always be accessible and not trapped by some obsolete, proprietary file and data format. So now we begin Phase II of the SilverStar Technology Plan. To be continued.
Posted by scott at July 24, 2004 11:15 AM