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.

The new update is available now in the iTunes App Store. Here’s a very short video demonstrating the picture support: