For Immediate Release (Palo Alto, CA - Friday, September 26, 2003) - AquaMinds Software Corporation, announced today that NoteTaker 2003 for OS X, version 1.6 is now shipping and available for download. The new update is free to all registered users directly from the company's web site. Additionally, an all new user guide is included in the update which has been designed for manual-style printing with facing pages or it can be viewed on-line.

Highlights in this update:

• Safari integration delivers interactive web page viewing within notebook pages
• Live web page display in Web Notebooks™
• AppleScript dictionary additions support enhanced customization
• New NoteTaker-AppleScript library (with more than 25 free workflow example scripts)
• Scan Image Tool for scanners with built-in OS X support enables integrated document archiving. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/scanners.html for a list of supported scanners.
• New User Guide designed for printing manual-style book
• Many enhancements, user-suggested improvements and new commands

Web Notebooks™ now support live web page content
With NoteTaker 1.6, users can now add live web pages to their own web notebook sites for enhanced information presentation and sharing. Web Notebooks are at the heart of NoteTaker's 1-Step Web Publishing Solution enabling users to quickly and easily create fully interactive web sites in just minutes. Web Notebooks can also include and display rich media types including QuickTime files (movies, sound, pictures, animation), NoteTaker voice memos, interactive outlines and now live web page content.

AppleScript delivers customization and new workflow scenarios
AppleScript support continues to evolve as consultants and script authors can now extend NoteTaker's program features with workflow combinations. The new NoteTaker AppleScript examples are free and can be downloaded from http://www.aquaminds.com/scripts.jsp

The new example scripts demonstrate how script authors and developers can quickly add and extend automated tasks to NoteTaker. Users can access these scripts directly from within NoteTaker's Scripts menu or by using the Contextual Menu as well.

Users will find a library of example scripts that use the new AppleScript improvements. One of the most requested scripts is called ToDoListHarvester which automatically gathers up any To Do list items from within an active notebook and moves the results to the dedicated To Do list section/pages.

Scan Image Tool seamlessly integrates supported Epson scanners
The new Scan Image Tool opens a panel for conveniently scanning documents, paper-based notes, receipts, forms et al for adding to notebooks to track expenses, job receipts and faxes. Scan Image Tool supports TWAIN/ICA-based drivers for OS X. Other scanner brands will be added in the future.

New NoteTaker documentation and Atomic Learning videos available
AquaMinds is now providing a free user guide for on-line viewing using Acrobat Reader. The NoteTaker 2003 User Guide has also been designed to be printed as a standard manual with facing pages. Atomic Learning, the leaders in on-demand, software tutorials via QuickTime videos, have just released a comprehensive 51 part series on learning and using NoteTaker. Information about the new series can be found on their site at http://www.atomiclearning.com/notetaker_2003_sample

Scott Love of AquaMinds talks about NoteTaker v1.6's milestones

"Apple continues to provide very powerful toolkits that we can directly leverage to the benefit of our users. For example, students and educators can now be working inside of NoteTaker v1.6, doing Internet-based research and work, while also using NoteTaker to gather, collect, and annotate excerpts of web pages by simply dragging selections from a web site that is being displayed live right there. It's amazing and very compelling as a student's daily digital notebook for organizing any and all course work," said Scott Love, president of AquaMinds Software Corporation. "I really wish we had these tools when I was a student at Stanford. The idea of having an electronic notebook application for any and all academic work is now a reality.

Scanning and archiving paper documents and notes
"Our new Scan Image Tool is the result of users telling us that they want a seamless way to get their paper-based images into their notebooks. Again, we are leveraging Apple's ICA architecture, which is something we hope more and more hardware vendors will do as well. The result is that we can add scanners such as the Epson series which conveniently provide TWAIN/ICA drivers for OS X. But the key technology we're leveraging is again the result of Apple's forward thinking. It's just a matter of time before more scanner vendors see the value of using Apple's architecture to their advantage. Why not?

NoteTaker's AppleScript support is powerful and pervasive
"In thinking about this particular NoteTaker release, you could call it the Apple technology platform advantage. OS X continues to prove to us (and to our users) why it's a smart platform to develop for. You get a level of integration and leverage not easily accessed or supported by other platforms. Internally, we talk about AppleScript as one of the best kept technology secrets around. On the surface, it appears almost trivial and irrelevant and yet, our new AppleScript enhancements show that users can extend a program such as NoteTaker in new directions not yet imagined. It's very AppleScript-ready and we intend to add even more capabilities to our dictionary.

ToDoListHarvester Example
"I use a new script called ToDoListHarvester almost daily now. It's like having a smart assistant go fetch and organize my random To Do list entries from anywhere within my current notebook and then puts them in my main To Do list section. And, my other favorite new AppleScript goodie is one that looks at my daily iCal schedule of events and places them in my current notebook page. The Roundtrip search agents are very convenient too. Just highlight text within your notebook, choose a search agent script and see the Google or search site results be displayed on the same page without ever leaving your current view. This is another advantage of using both AppleScript and the Safari webkit technology to deliver more productivity to our users.

AppleScript Enables Customization and Workflow Productivity
"We like what Apple is doing to enable the turbo-charging of applications. AppleScript is very subtle but another example of the many advantages of using OS X. If possible, every OS X application should use AppleScript because ultimately, users get the direct benefits of improved productivity as others extend the richness and depth of an application and its interactions among other OS X applications. We think AppleScript is a big step in the right direction for enabling customization and workflow automation, for both personal and workgroup users. NoteTaker is a very compelling AppleScript platform. It's been there since day one when we first introduced NoteTaker last year but this is by far our best AppleScript technology update."

 
Information Processing Power Every Day
NoteTaker 2003 for OS X is personal productivity software designed for daily use. With NoteTaker, you can quickly and easily take notes, manage project plans, create simple full screen slide presentations, drag or clip information from other applications (or use NoteTaker Services), index and search notebooks, publish and share information, add voice memos, and, best of all, customize it to fit your digital lifestyle, your information workstyle. For some tasks, generating a long document is not required and yet there is a need to capture information, organize and process it. Making an outline or creating a list are both examples of tasks that don't necessarily require a word processor and yet the idea of electronic paper for jotting down notes is useful and convenient. Even the capture, retrieval, and organization of random information throughout the day is another example of the need NoteTaker fills.

NoteTaker is an ideal tool for working with unstructured, on-the-fly information you create, organize or gather daily. Using it can be as simple as making lists or as complex as organizing a notebook full of personal notes and pages of information. As NoteTaker's visual metaphor of an electronic spiral notebook with section tabs suggests, there is always the need to find and to retrieve information at anytime without the complexity or the overhead of a database system. Thus, NoteTaker automatically and transparently works behind the scenes to index and categorize notebooks full of information. If it's in NoteTaker, it can be searched and retrieved anytime.

Additional Notes
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: NoteTaker 2003 is a native OS X application developed using Apple's Cocoa platform/development environment. NoteTaker 1.6 runs on OS X 10.2.x or higher.

For a complete list of product features, screen shots and access to downloads, visit AquaMinds web site at www.aquaminds.com A 30-day free demo test-drive version is available for download at http://www.aquaminds.com/download.jsp

PRESS & MEDIA Notes: The screen shot gallery is available at the following location: http://www.aquaminds.com/exampleGallery.jsp

Articles and product reviews can be found at the following location: http://www.aquaminds.com/company.jsp

Trademark & Copyright Notice: AquaMinds™ and NoteTaker™ - Copyright 2002-2003 Aquaminds Software Corporation. The names of actual companies and products mentioned in this document may be the trademarks of their respective companies.