**UPDATE: Penultimate has since been updated with significant advancements for Left-Handed users. Our blog post referring to this is here. **

Do you have vivid memories of your schooldays, picking up your pen from the paper you were writing on to discover the side of your hand covered in smudged ink? If so, you’re probably left-handed, and this post is for you— and I know there are lots of you!

Our “Wrist Protection” feature is designed to allow you to write with Penultimate while resting your wrist on the iPad’s surface as well. This works remarkably well for many note-takers, but as many have have noticed, it’s less effective for some kinds of left-handed grips, especially “overhand” ones. 

I want to explain why this is, and let you know that we’re working on it. 

Apple’s iOS platform does not allow apps to see any information about the size of touches on the glass, which is the best way of detecting stray wrist or palm contact. Penultimate’s Wrist Protection is actually “heuristic”: for every touch, we do a sophisticated set of computations to determine how likely that touch is to be a “writing” touch, or a “wrist” touch. They are easiest to tell apart when the wrist occupies a clearly different area of the page than the ink does. This is true of most right-handed grips, and is also true of the “standard” grip that left-handed students are generally taught in early schooling. But this grip doesn’t come naturally to all lefties, and many left-handed writers continue into adulthood using an overhand grip, where the wrist is to the direct left of—and sometimes above—the line of writing.

Some users have suggested that we simply introduce a “left handed” mode for Wrist Protection. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as it sounds. Lefty grips aren’t just “mirrors” of righty grips; like the smudged hand in school indicates, the ink and your wrist are more likely to be in the same place when you’re left-handed, and so they’re harder to tell apart.

So please know that there’s nothing “sinister” going on here. We’re not anti-lefty at Cocoa Box, and we are definitely not intentionally ignoring our left-handed users because there are fewer of them— Wrist Protection is simply a technically more difficult problem when dealing with overhand grips.

But we have do some improvements in the pipeline— not quite yet, but soon— and if you’re a frustrated southpaw, we’d love to get your pre-release feedback on them. Send an email to lefty@cocoabox.com, and we’ll put you on a Wrist Protection beta list.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

Ben @ Cocoa Box HQ.

[Photo credit: The White House on Flickr]