After many late nights, at least a hundred unforeseen bugs (several of which were of the "pound your head on the table until you bleed variety") and absolutely no coffee (this is a joint project with BYU) Blue Mango Learning Systems is proud to officially announce the release of MediaNotes 1.1. Ahh..there is nothing like the feeling of shipping software. This represents the first commercial release of MediaNotes.

Many people ask me what MediaNotes does and, to be honest, I haven't been able to come up with a succinct way of stating what it does. But I think that I finally have it: "MediaNotes doesn't let you lie."

Why would people lie when reviewing video performances? Because in the past it has been too hard to tell the truth. It was easier to give vague, unspecific feedback. It was too hard to be precise.

Not anymore.

When you are analyzing a performance in MediaNotes the actual actions are right there in front of you. There is no opportunity to be vague. MediaNotes makes it easy and efficient to provide specific, detailed feedback. We spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the features you use in your everyday analysis would be simple and straightforward. We hope that is what we have achieved.

We would like to thank Larry Farmer and Gerald Williams at the Brigham Young University School of Law for all of their help in getting MediaNotes to this point (MediaNotes was developed through a joint partnership between BYU and Blue Mango Learning Systems). The concept of MediaNotes originated with them and Raymond Robinson at BYU. We have had a great collaborative relationship which has really improved the software.

A special thanks has to go out to Trevor DeVore of Blue Mango Learning Systems. He has spent countless hours making sure that MediaNotes was "right". This was a pretty ambitious project, especially releasing cross platform versions (for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X). But he bravely blazed new trails and I think that the resulting software is quite impressive.

Let us know what you think. You can download MediaNotes and register for a free 30-day trial at the MediaNotes website. You can also view some tutorials of how to use MediaNotes here.

At Blue Mango Learning Systems our primary focus is to make communication through media more efficient. With MediaNotes 1.1 we hope that we have taken a major step forward towards that goal.

Greg DeVore CEO Blue Mango Learning Systems

Do you evvr mispel words? We do. That is why we are excited to announce ScreenSteps 1.2 beta with…SPELL CHECKING! Sorry it took so long but it is finally here.

You can download the public beta here. Here is a quick overview of the other features that are included in this release:

PDF Improvements

You can now add a custom logo and footer to your PDF documents. You can also add PDF author information. This can all be done in the preferences screen.

Step titles are now added as bookmarks to PDF files.

Capture Palette

ScreenSteps now includes a new Capture Palette. The Capture Palette will float on top of other applications making it much easier to capture images for ScreenSteps lessons.

Animated GIFs ScreenSteps will now leave animated GIFs intact when exporting to HTML.

Read the release notes for more information about other features and fixes.

ScreenSteps Docs Beta 8

We have also made some minor enhancements to ScreenSteps Docs. The main improvement here is that file paths in a project are stored relatively, making it easier to move projects around.

You can read about the other enhancements here.

You can download the new beta of ScreenSteps Docs here.

New Public Beta

We have posted a new public beta of MediaNotes. This includes many bug fixes as well as enhancements to Playlists and the Tag Manager. You can download the new beta here:

http://www.medianotes-app.com/downloads/

New Tutorials

We have also added a lot of new tutorials to help you get up and running. The full list of tutorials is here:

http://www.medianotes-app.com/manual/medianotes/

One tutorial that will probably be of interest to many of you is the "Using MediaNotes in a Course" lesson. It gives you a good overview of how you can integrate MediaNotes into a classroom.

Pricing

We have also announced pricing for MediaNotes. An individual license will cost $499.

For organizations that will be using MediaNotes with many people (i.e. universities or consulting firms) you can purchase a site license at a much reduced per seat cost. You can get more information about the purchase options here:

http://www.medianotes-app.com/purchase/

We are working hard at getting MediaNotes ready for its final release. We anticipate this happening in the first half of September. We will keep you posted.