Review: Penultimate, jot this one down

For anyone who communicates visually, there's an app for that. By communicating visually, I mean sketching out a simple illustration to get an idea across. Penultimate is a no-nonsense app that does that elegantly well.


Ink with emphasis.
It's surprising that so few drawing apps take advantage of the ipad screen to control emphasis. Most offer a primitive, consistent-width line that gets very clunky when you move fast. Penultimate has no width setting. And doesn't need one. Just like a real marker on paper, draw slowly and the ink absorbs. Draw more quickly and the line gets thinner. There are no jagged curves, just a nice smooth stroke. It mimics ink so well that there are nice round blots at the beginning and end of each stroke. There are no colors. And that's fine. They'd just get in the way of quick expression.

Penultimate gets you to a blank page fast. If you've every tried to jot down a phone number with a painting app, you find you have to wait for the app to open, wait for a file to open, choose a pen and...you get the point. It's not quick or very convenient. In Penultimate you're quickly taken to your last entry. Tap the page number and start jotting.


Org and export.
You get an infinite number of notebooks with an infinite number of pages to help you organize your scrawls. This is how you'd organize real paper notebooks, so it feels natural. Tap the page number to go to the next page or the opposite corner to go back. In the Notebooks screen you can tap the cover of the notebook to close it for less distraction.

When you export a page, it's popped into an email as a PNG file. This allows you to quickly jot down an idea and send it off. When you export a whole notebook, it's saved as a PDF. The paper background is there for drawing reference and is not exported so you get clean black on white.


There's nothing fancy here. I see people whining on the App Store, wanting to make this a complex paint app. They don't get it. It's a pen and a notebook. And that's all it needs to be.