As a tool for productivity, Penultimate aspires to be a critical part of your creative and note-taking workflow. Penultimate 3.3 is a huge update that adds high-quality integration with popular services Dropbox and Evernote, as well as new features to help you move your data around your iPad more easily.
Dropbox is a popular free service that facilitates the sharing, syncing, and backup of files across your computers and devices, storing your data safely in the cloud. Penultimate now lets you send notebooks and pages up to your Dropbox, so you can share with collaborators, store for later, or anything else. You can import (copy) from Dropbox any notebook file you have access to. But that’s not all! We’ve also added a dead-simple optional automatic backup system: if you don’t back up your individual notebooks regularly, simply switch it on, and always have a full set of your notebooks and papers saved in your Dropbox in case disaster strikes.
Evernote is another free service that keeps your data in the cloud, but with a very different focus: Evernote is great for collecting and searching through lots of data from different sources. And here’s what makes it really great: Evernote is really good at handwriting recognition. So when you send notebooks and pages to Evernote, you can go to Evernote’s web site or iPad app, and search through your handwritten notes! This is very powerful, and a really natural fit for Penultimate users. It’s so natural that we built a super-simple way to sign up for Evernote right into the app so you can give it a try. Just push the “Link With Evernote Account” button in settings, and tap “Create Account”. They have a snazzy iPad app, too for viewing and searching, too; check it out.
We’re extremely proud of these two integrations. It’s all very easy to use with a high quality user interface, and designed for your workflow: if you send revisions of the same notebook to either service, you’ll even be offered the chance to replace the one that’s already there with the new version.
There are a few more new features that can help you shuttle your data around. Penultimate now supports the iPad-wide “Open In” function, so you can open your Penultimate notebooks and pages (as PDFs and PNGs, respectively) in other iPad apps that support them. You can also use the system-wide clipboard to copy images into Penultimate (like from Safari), and paste Penultimate ink into other apps.
Finally, 안녕하세요 and 您好! Penultimate is now fully localized into Korean and (simplified) Chinese, so we welcome those users.
Penultimate 3.2 is out today, and boy is it a doozy. We’ve taken a huge bunch of time-saving functionality and rolled it all into one power productivity update. Without further ado:
We have a very cool new scissors tool. Use it to move/cut/copy/paste ink around pages and between pages and notebooks. Just drag around the ink you want to move— it’s very intuitive and not restrictive like a rectangle would be. Drag to move the selection, tap it for Cut & Copy options.
Mix-n-Match papers within a notebook! Now you can finally build real photo albums, datebooks, mixed project notebooks, and more. Choosing a paper now applies to the page you’re on.
Moving pages! A longstanding user request, the page browser now offers a “Move To” function for individual pages, or multiple ones. You can push them into any other notebook, or use them to create a fresh notebook.
Duplicate full notebooks, or merge one notebook entirely into another.
Want to change the title of the notebook you just created? Now you can tap the title in the toolbar to edit it.
Many of the features we’re launching today are fan favorites; serious users will be able to organize better and work more effectively. And the colors and scissors tool open up whole new creative avenues for everyone.
Penultimate is compatible with the upcoming iOS 5 release. This includes backing up all your app data in the iCloud service, which is easier than syncing to iTunes all the time. (Please do review our post on Multitasking Gestures.)
We’re thrilled about this power-packed upgrade, and we hope you are too. You can find Penultimate here. (Love the update? We’d be honored by a nice review in iTunes. :) )
** Critical for Stylus and Wrist Protection Users **
Apple’s new iOS 5 operating system will launch on October 12 for all iPad owners, bringing with it a host of valuable improvements, including simple iCloud (internet) backup of all app data files.
You should be aware of one new feature, however, that will cause problems with Penultimate and other handwriting apps. “Multitasking Gestures” is an enhancement that allows you to switch between apps using just a multitouch gesture. It does this by interpreting the touch input when there are four or more “touches” on the screen.
If you use Penultimate by writing with your wrist on the screen, Multitasking Gestures will be accidentally triggered, and will make the app unresponsive. Your writing may be interrupted, and Penultimate may appear to have frozen until you remove your hand from the glass and start over.
Unfortunately, Penultimate cannot automatically correct for this. The iPad does not tell the app that this is happening, and does not allow the app to prevent it.
You, however, can disable Multitasking Gestures by using Settings on your iPad. In the General settings area, look for Multitasking Gestures, and simply turn it “Off”:
(Please note that Multitasking Gestures may only be an issue on iPad 2.)
We’ve been hard at work for months and today I’m very excited to announce Penultimate 3.1, an update with two big enhancements that really expand the potential uses significantly as well as shore up up the technical power of the app.
First, we’ve added photo and image import. This has long been a user request, and we wanted to get it right. You can drop any image from your Photo Library (or the camera on an iPad 2) onto a notebook page. The resize, rotate, and move functions all work and feel great. The really cool part is that the photos act like real photos. If you write on them, the ink goes with them when you move them. This opens up Penultimate to a world of annotation, cataloging, fieldwork, and more.
You can drop multiple pictures on a page, and if one partially covers another, you can “slide” the bottom one out from under the top one, which will bring it to the front. This is a subtle but slick interaction that I’m really proud of.
If you look in the Paper Shop, you’ll find a new “Photo Pages” paper collection, with some simple but useful papers for you to look at if you’re considering putting an album together. (Those are “magic”— if you add a photo on one of those papers, it will automatically be positioned and sized accordingly.) This collection is just 99 cents.
Second, lefties rejoice! But also righties! As long promised, we’ve significantly overhauled automatic Wrist Protection in the app, which should improve the experience for nearly all writers. Right-handed users will find far fewer stray marks on their pages, and left-handed users should be able to work with it comfortably. There’s a neat new “wrist position” menu in the Settings area that you should go update with the way that you write. (It defaults to a standard right-handed grip. Southpaws: that’s just a sensible, statistical choice; nothing personal!) The automatic Wrist Protection is far more technically advanced that it has been, but it’s still an algorithm, so it’s not going to be 100% perfect. As we continue to refine it, please send us feedback.
[Penultimate is currently on sale for Back-To-School. Get it here.]
Hey kids,
Gather round the glowing iPad and set a spell. I want to tell you about a land before time, and a time before the internet. It was the 1980s. The man who would grow up to make iPods was probably wearing a Walkman when trying to get kids to play Oregon Trail on his Apple IIe computers. And we wrote notes the old-fashioned way: on thin sheets of blended trees.
But we also needed to organize those papers, and a company called Mead came to the rescue with the do-all, impress-everybody school supply that absolutely everyone wanted: The Trapper Keeper. It was a pad of paper. A binder. A set of folders. They were held together by indestructible vinyl plastic with an awesome velcro latch, and had cool pictures, like racecars, on them.
But though every school year began in velcroed, organized glory, the wheels would come off the proverbial racecar by the holidays. The vinyl was actually not indestructible, the folders would tear at the holes, and the binder rings were made of cheap plastic and never really closed. Trapper Keepers were ever-cool, but the school year ended with the things serving mainly as a clever juvenile punchline.*
It’s amazing how far 20 years gets us. You can use your iPad to do everything the Trapper Keeper did, and a whole universe more, and it takes up less space, won’t fall apart, and probably weighs less.
We’re proud to have Penultimate doing some of the great work Trapper Keepers did, for students around the globe, while being more reliable. Our pages never rip out from over use, you get as many as you want in one place, and you can create your own papers or share them with your classmates.
Penultimate is currently on sale in honor of the start of the school year. For one buck American (or the equivalent in your currency!), Penultimate can take its place inside of your virtual velcro folder. And stay tuned for some even greater updates.
Just a quick note to let you know that we’re transitioning to a new support solution. We’ve now got a system in place that lets us easily keep up with FAQs, publish how-to articles, and provide faster-turnaround, personalized support for anything that’s not covered.
You can also, as always, email support@cocoabox.com, or feedback@cocoabox.com to share your questions or thoughts with us.
Now is also a great (if terribly belated) time to give a warm send-off to our former community manager Angela, who did a fantastic job but has moved on to other challenges. And in that spirit, I’d also like to welcome Sarah, who has taken up the mantle and is behind this transition to the new system.
Yesterday I wrote about the very cool work that Stu Maschwitz has done with Penultimate in film storyboarding. His post was also quoted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who observed that going beyond a specific need to a broader problem is a “good way to think about making feature requests.”
I’ve thought about this for some time, and I’d like to say a little more about the way that I listen to users, and by extension, how you can have a more powerful impact on the development of Penultimate and your other favorite apps.
The software ecosystem is splintering as we speak, into a huge constellation of relatively small shops producing mobile, desktop and web software that’s accessible to a very broadly-based mass market. This is unprecedented in the history of software, and one of its consequences is that end users often have a remarkably direct line to the ears of the people who make the software that they use every day. It’s both rewarding and useful for me to hear from passionate users like Stu— we get lots of email and feedback on our community page every day.
Very often, feedback is framed in terms of a “feature request”. This is a shopworn phrase that encompasses messages like “Hey, I would like Penultimate to do or have thing XYZ”. (In our case, XYZ is something like “more pen colors”, “text input”, “handwriting recognition”.) Here’s the problem with requests like this: they don’t tell me everything that I need to know. My responsibility as a product manager is to tease out the actual problems that are behind the request, not just build the features.
I’ll give you an example from Penultimate. Early versions of the app had the eraser function, but the eraser was a fixed circular size (about the size of a fingertip). I got lots of feedback asking for selectable eraser sizes (small, medium, large). That was the feature request: “add other eraser sizes.” But more eraser options, as such, was not what these users were really asking for, which was usually a way to do detailed erasing in small areas. Instead of complying with the letter of the request, I like to think I did one better, which was to make the eraser size dynamic. There’s still just one eraser, but if you’re working in a detailed area, it’s tiny. If you make huge swipes, it’s large.
In software design, there’s a phrase for this sort of thinking that I much prefer: “use case.” Although it’s inside-baseball terminology, the distinction is important. A use case describes what the user wants to achieve, not the specifics of how they achieve it. Use-case-based design means you dig at what people are trying to do with your software, and use your knowledge about what is possible to try to solve their problems. (Or, in some cases, decide those problems are just out of scope for what your software does.)
I often reply to users by email or on Twitter asking for more context for their requests, and I’m often surprised by what I hear. Someone else’s distillation of a use case into a feature request is not necessarily obvious until I ask. The real risk of granting only “feature requests” is that I’ll end up with more clutter in my software, yet not actually solve my users’ problems, or not solve them as elegantly as possible.
Other examples: Penultimate has a single-button export-all-to-iTunes feature, and a single-button create-and-open-notebook feature, because “back up all my notebooks” and “let me start a new notebook quickly” were important use cases that came out of user discussions.
So! Now for advice to users of Penultimate or any app: when you give developers feedback, be sure to include how you use the app and what you’re trying to accomplish. Explain the “why”, as well as the “what”. Tell me about your workflow, and where the app falls down in that workflow. You may find you get both a better response from developers, as well as a greater likelihood of having your actual problem solved.
I’m hard at work on the next update to Penultimate, and looking forward, as always, to hearing your use cases.
At Cocoa Box, we love hearing the wide variety of uses people find for Penultimate. So we were thrilled to read this very cool post by filmmaker, visual effects guy, and writer Stu Maschwitz. He talks about what he does, how he uses Penultimate, and best of all, he created and posted a whole series of downloadable storyboard papers that anyone can use!
As I detailed in The DV Rebel’s Guide, storyboards don’t have to be immaculately drawn to be effective. Which is lucky for me, because I have let wither whatever drawing ability I once had. To me, the boarding process is about flow. I need a tool that allows me to bang out my ideas as they come. For as long as I can remember, that’s been printed storyboard templates and a mechanical pencil.
[…]
Penultimate is a great example of filmmaking software that isn’t just for filmmaking. I’m so fired up about my new storyboarding workflow that I’m sharing my Prolost storyboarding templates.
Dropbox is a popular free service that facilitates the sharing, syncing, and backup of files across your computers and devices, storing your data safely in the cloud. Penultimate now lets you send notebooks and pages up to your Dropbox, so you can share with collaborators, store for later, or anything else. You can import (copy) from Dropbox any notebook file you have access to. But that’s not all! We’ve also added a dead-simple optional automatic backup system: if you don’t back up your individual notebooks regularly, simply switch it on, and always have a full set of your notebooks and papers saved in your Dropbox in case disaster strikes. 
Evernote is another free service that keeps your data in the cloud, but with a very different focus: Evernote is great for collecting and searching through lots of data from different sources. And here’s what makes it really great: Evernote is really good at handwriting recognition. So when you send notebooks and pages to Evernote, you can go to Evernote’s web site or iPad app, and search through your handwritten notes! This is very powerful, and a really natural fit for Penultimate users. It’s so natural that we built a super-simple way to sign up for Evernote right into the app so you can give it a try. Just push the “Link With Evernote Account” button in settings, and tap “Create Account”. They have a snazzy iPad app, too for viewing and searching, too; check it out.
Second, lefties rejoice! But also righties! As long promised, we’ve significantly overhauled automatic Wrist Protection in the app, which should improve the experience for nearly all writers. Right-handed users will find far fewer stray marks on their pages, and left-handed users should be able to work with it comfortably. There’s a neat new “wrist position” menu in the Settings area that you should go update with the way that you write. (It defaults to a standard right-handed grip. Southpaws: that’s just a sensible, statistical choice; nothing personal!) The automatic Wrist Protection is far more technically advanced that it has been, but it’s still an algorithm, so it’s not going to be 100% perfect. As we continue to refine it, please send us feedback.
