Cocoa Box Notes

The Future is Bright

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:04:00 -0700

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.

You can read more about the news over at the Evernote blog here.

Ben Z.

Special Update for New iPad

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:17:12 -0700

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!

Thank you.

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 12:58:00 -0800

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.)

"No App Is An Island"

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:53:00 -0800

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.

Happy New Year everyone, and enjoy!

Don’t have Penultimate yet? Grab it on the App Store.

Colorful Power: Penultimate 3.2

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:44:00 -0700

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.

More colors! They are: Summer Squash Yellow, Vertigo Orange, Japanese Eggplant Purple, and Very Nearly White, the last of which is great for marking up photos. All very classy. You can take these colors anywhere.

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. :) )

Enjoy!

Portrait by Mieke Strand.

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:18:00 -0700

Portrait by Mieke Strand.

iOS 5 Multitasking Gestures Warning

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:35:00 -0700

** 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.)

Picture Perfect Captain of the Hook

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:19:00 -0700

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:

Penultimate's classroom potential

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 14:32:00 -0700

Apple.com calls Penultimate one of their “favorite apps for learning.”

(OK, I doctored the screenshot a little bit in the interest of compactness. But we’re easy to find on the page.)

As always, very proud when the folks in Cupertino help us spread the word about the clean, uncluttered professionalism of Penultimate.

You can get Penultimate here.

Can I Borrow Your 3-Hole Punch?

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:07:00 -0700

[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.

Best wishes for a great year!

Ben

* “What do you do when you see a girl you like?”

New & Improved Support

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:48:12 -0700

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.

Check it out here!

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.

Thanks!

Ben

How To Get What You Want

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:13:00 -0700

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.

Ben

"Filmmaking software that isn't just for filmmaking."

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:23:00 -0700

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.

Check out his whole post, and a bunch of downloadable storyboard templates, here.

(from prolost.com)

Got a great story about how Penultimate fits into your workflow? Let us know.

Apple recommends Penultimate for grads

Mon, 23 May 2011 11:11:14 -0700

We were honored to see Penultimate called out as a suggested app in the Apple marketing email that turned up in our inboxes over the weekend:

Thanks to the thoughtful folks down in Cupertino for another shout out. And hey, if you do know a new grad with a ‘pad, you can gift them a copy of the app. :) Meanwhile, this email has been printed out and posted on our refrigerator (really).

Minor update: Writing collection is free, etc.

Mon, 09 May 2011 20:34:19 -0700

As promised in my post last week, a new point release of Penultimate (v3.0.1) is now live on the app store. The most visible change is that the “writing” paper collection in the paper shop is now free. Other price reductions went into effect several days ago.

For users who are interested in the convenience of the add on papers, I hope the new pricing structure is more palatable than the previous one. For those who weren’t interested in the first place, no need to dig further, and the paper community is being created.

I am juggling several very important, very cool feature updates to Penultimate, all coming soon. I’m really excited to get those done and out the door. Stay tuned for great new stuff!

As always, positive reviews and ratings on the app store make a big difference to potential new customers, and are always appreciated as a way to show your affinity for Penultimate.

Ben

P.S. Today’s tiny update also includes a couple significant bug fixes: one for paper import of certain images, and one for some eraser size problems.

Paper Shop Followup

Thu, 05 May 2011 12:26:02 -0700

Hi everyone,

There’s been some confusion, causing unhappiness, since the release of Penultimate 3.0 and its inclusion of an in-app Paper Shop. I don’t like seeing that, because it means that I haven’t done a very good job of something along the way. Many users perceive that I am strong-arming them into buying virtual paper from the Paper Shop, or suckering them out of their money for something they believe should be free. None of this is true, but I take responsibility for the confusion, and will make some changes moving forward.

The 3.0 release significantly expands what you can do with Penultimate by adding an ability to import any image as a paper texture. This originated with reams of user feedback. Some requests were for simple additional papers (new graph papers, music staff paper), but the majority of the paper-style requests were all over the map, and were often domain-specific to whatever the user’s workflow is (film storyboarding, landscape architecture, web design mockups, etc). It is so cool to see what people do with the app, but there was no way that I could fulfill all of those needs by just adding dozens of best-guess styles into Penultimate. (To say nothing of how cluttered that would have made the app feel.) The best way of allowing any user to reach their full creative goals was to allow them to bring into the app whatever template they needed. It was then my job to make sure that it looked great, and integrated into the experience in the high-quality way you’ve come to expect from Penultimate. I’m proud of the simplicity and quality of this function. I also built in a capability of sharing the papers, to encourage a community to form around user-created papers.

The Paper Shop component was intended primarily as a convenience for a minority of users. There were some specific paper requests that were common enough to design in-house and offer to users directly, should they prefer a simple install to hunting around for an exactly matched guitar chord chart (say). Many of these papers add significant extra value to the app— transforming it into a music composition tool, in one case. Charging a small amount for these very optional add-ons didn’t seem unreasonable, and they’re targeted at a self-selecting set of users, ones who are usually quite dedicated to the tasks they need the papers for.

Unfortunately, the release was not perceived universally as a great paper import and management feature with an adjunct shop for convenience. And that failing is mine: as much sense as this made to me, it was not explained clearly enough and did not reflect the marketplace.

It actually turns out that lots of people are interested in the Paper Shop paper collections— more so than the fraction that I imagined. These users have broader use cases for the app, and don’t want to feel overcharged for specialty house-built papers that they’d like easier access to.

I think The Paper Shop is a great way of providing specific, well-designed papers that not everyone will need. But I am going to take three steps here to address concerns:

I will provide at least one free add-on collection of papers. This will allow all users to see how it works, and get value out of it, without any extra outlay. This will require an app update because the technical infrastructure to support it isn’t completely finished in the current version. This update will appear as soon as possible

In the meanwhile, to make them more accessible to more users, I’ll be lowering the price on some of the existing collections, effective tonight. If you’ve already bought one of these paper collections this week I will refund the difference to you directly via PayPal. I don’t get a record of who purchased things, so forward your iTunes receipt within the next 30 days to paperrefund@cocoabox.com along with your PayPal address. If the paper collection(s) you’ve purchased is made free with the next update, I’ll refund you the full price at that time. It might take me a few weeks to get through them, but I don’t want anyone feeling like they got a raw deal.

Most importantly, I’m going to move more quickly on something I was intending to do anyways: provide a centralized location for user-created paper files that all Penultimate users can browse and download from. Lots of users have already taken up the task of building great templates for the app. If you will have some you’d like to share, let me know by sending me an email at papersubmission@cocoabox.com (don’t send papers yet). No announcement yet on the form this will take, but stay tuned for something soon.

I hope this explains the intention behind Penultimate 3.0— an update I believe opens up a lot of new applications for the app—and allays what may have been some of your concerns. If you have others, please send me a note directly at ben@cocoabox.com.

Thanks for reading and, as always, for your support.

Ben

Papers, papers, papers

Mon, 02 May 2011 14:25:00 -0700

Ahoy Penultimate users! Today is a huge day, because I get to share Penultimate version 3.0 with you. This update has been in progress for a long time, and I think you’re going to like it— a whole new dimension of uses has opened up for the app.

You can now import any image to use as a template in creating a paper to use in your notebooks. Practicing your Chinese characters? Composing new percussion riffs? Creating user interface mockups? You can just pull in your template image from your iPad Photos library.

Your papers will look classy, like they’re really part of the notebook. To create your own, tap the “+” icon in the paper menu.

You can import any paper you like, but for convenient to-do lists, day planners, or music staff paper, or primary school writing paper, check out The Paper Shop, a brand new little shop inside the app. You’ll find a number of useful (and fun) paper collections for quick purchase and download.

Here’s a short video showing off the new features of Penultimate 3.0.

(Want to use that film storyboard paper I created in the video? If you’re using your iPad, just tap here to download and import it into Penultimate.)

I’m very excited about this release. The ability to bring in custom paper is going to make Penultimate a whole lot more useful for many users. I’m also hoping that the ability to share any paper you’ve created will enable a community to grow around papers for the app.

UPDATE: If you do create papers and would like to share with the community, we’re cooking up a centralized place for people to go do that. It’s still under development, but send me an email (papersubmission@cocoabox.com) if you have papers you’d like to share.

UPDATE 2: We’re making some changes to The Paper Shop based on user feedback. Please read the additional info here.

Enjoy!

(Hint: when building your own templates, try 718x865 as the image resolution.)

Win a colored Griffin stylus

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:46:00 -0700

The folks over at Griffin have started a great promotion where they’re giving away one of their snazzy new colored styluses (along with a free copy of Penultimate) every day for 10 days. Don’t have a stylus yet? You should, and now you might get one gratis. It’s cool that Griffin has picked a ballsy bunch of colors that don’t look like the Apple standard palette.

Head over there and enter right quick.

Czech Books

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:48:29 -0700

Found these lower-school exercise books from the Czech Republic in a little shop stateside. Lots of pages of blue-lined graph paper inside.

I’ve always had a hard time with the original Moleskines and their knockoffs. They’re alluring, but in practice nothing I write or sketch feels important enough for a hardbound notebook. That’s why I always preferred softcover notebooks that feel like they’re made for everyday work. The wonderful Field Notes are like this, as are the Clairefontaine notebooks of my own school days. I know that people use Penultimate the same way— durably capturing everything from critical ideas to idle scribbles— which is exactly the idea.

P.S. All “credit” for the title of this post goes to my colleague Angela. :-)

"Half the pressure, twice the speed"

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:05:00 -0700

This may be the most lyrical slogan ever printed on a lowly pencil. In this case, it graces the side of the legendary Blackwing 602, a pencil beloved by artists and writers for its beautiful line, but discontinued and unavailable since 1998.

I love both the act and the tools of handwriting, so I was honored recently to meet Charles Berolzheimer of the California Cedar Company. They’re one of the largest producers in the world of the wood “slats” used to make pencils, and it was from Berolzheimer that I learned about the Blackwing. The model was manufactured by Eberhard-Faber for somewhere over a half century, and used by writer John Steinbeck and animator Chuck Jones, among many others. It has a great smoothness to it, and a unique ferrule. (“What is a ‘ferrule’,” you might ask, as I did of Berolzheimer. It’s the metal bit on top that holds the eraser on.) The Blackwing’s eraser isn’t cylindrical, but rectangular, with a metal clip to hold it in the ferrule. So these pencils are unusually good and pretty cool looking, too. But waning demand, combined with 1990s corporate takeovers and (amazingly) an unrepairable breakdown of the special-ferrule-making machine meant the end of the Blackwing.

Want to see what all the fuss is about? So do lots of people: die-hards who refuse to abandon the Blackwing will pay $20-40 for a single unsharpened pencil on eBay. Like a foolish moth to a hipster flame, I found one selling at the low end of that scale—Only $18! Not collector quality!—and grabbed it. It is definitely a thing of weirdo beauty, and it does make a lovely line. The slogan is my favorite part, though: “Half the pressure, twice the speed” would sound vaguely dirty out of context, but stamped on this writing instrument it recalls an earnest industriousness of the early twentieth century.

Berolzheimer brought good news with him. Although his company mainly provides the wood for other manufacturers, he has started overseeing small production runs of high-quality finished pencils. And they’ve created a tribute to the Blackwing. It’s part of their Palomino line, and although the Palomino Blackwing has a softer lead and different styling than the original 602, it’s got the cool eraser, it is a great pencil, and it’s more affordable. More recently, they’ve announced that they’re working on an even more faithful recreation, with more similar lead and the famous slogan stamped on the side. I’m looking forward to trying one of those out.

Meanwhile, if you’re intrigued, there are people out on the internet who take Blackwings and their history very seriously. Some even think they’re better than iPads (!). I’d just say it’s important to have the right tool for the job, and it’s a bonus if that tool has a great story behind it.