I’m Ben, the creator of Penultimate, and today I’m proud to announce that Penultimate is becoming part of the Evernote family. Penultimate is the best and best-selling handwriting app for iPad. Evernote is a company whose mission is to help you “remember everything”, with a popular and powerful service for creating notes of all kinds and making them searchable and findable anywhere. They have a longstanding commitment to handwriting recognition— members of the core Evernote team have been building handwriting technology since the Apple Newton (really). Penultimate already offers basic Evernote integration, and tons of people are right now using Evernote’s recognition, search, and organization for their Penultimate notes.
Realizing that Evernote and Penultimate have such obviously complementary technologies, we’re teaming up. Evernote has acquired Penultimate, and I’ll be joining Evernote to help bring their significant resources to bear on making Penultimate better, faster. You’ll also start seeing Penultimate (finally!) on other devices, and we’ll be bringing great handwriting into other parts of Evernote.
Importantly, Penultimate is not going away: it remains an independent application, and will continue to espouse the virtues of ease of use, elegance, and “that special something” that have kept you coming back. But I also think you’ll be thrilled, and even surprised, by how much more the app will be able to do for you as we work together to improve it and connect more profoundly with Evernote’s capabilities.
Penultimate has come a long way since its launch as the original dedicated handwriting app for Apple’s first iPad two years ago. It now offers scores of powerful features within that same accessible and attractive design. It’s remained a top-selling app, and millions of people have showed us that they’re doing things with Penultimate we never imagined. I’ve been amazed and humbled by all of the passionate users I’ve encountered— you have offered your valuable feedback, support, and candid (!) critiques. Penultimate would not be what it is without you. I believe that this partnership makes a lot of sense, and Penultimate is only going to get better from here. Not just incrementally better, but WAY better, and quickly. I’m excited about the future of the app, and I sincerely hope that you will be too.
Penultimate 3.3.1 is out today. This is a special update designed specifically to provide a really great high-resolution experience for users of the new iPad (third-generation) with its beautiful “retina” display. Your notebooks and papers will be automatically converted to the new, higher resolution. The thinnest pen width looks especially lovely on the new devices. Enjoy!
This update also offers a handful of bug fixes and usability improvements for all users. Stay tuned for more feature news about Penultimate soon!
Penultimate is the #4 best-selling iPad app of all time. Apple has just announced the iTunes App Store surpassed 25 billion app downloads, and with it released the list of most-downloaded apps for iPhones and iPads. We are thrilled and honored to see Penultimate featured, and we’re grateful as always for all of our passionate users around the world and your support over the last couple years. (You can see the announcement and full app list on the App Store by following this link.)
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.
Dropbox
Evernote
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.
