(this is a copy of an app review that I posted to the iTunes AppStore a day or so ago)
Penultimate for iPad is an amazing digital rendition of the traditional paper notebook. The on-screen writing is smoother than any other handwriting or drawing app I’ve tried, and I’ve tired several. This is the only app in which writing and scribbles actually look acceptable. No straight lines or blockiness, even when you write fast. Other apps seems to have trouble keeping up with the speed of on-screen writing or drawing. After trying several drawing and writing apps I thought that this was a hardware problem, but this app manages brilliantly so obviously this is a challenge that solid development can overcome. Really great job with the handwriting part!
The line thickness gets thinner when you write faster. The is a very nice touch and looks like real pen strokes on paper.
If I was rating the handwriting function alone, this would be a five-star app. But the overall usability is somewhat lacking, so I have to give it 3 stars. The problem is that this app functions just like paper notebooks, and replicates all the problems inherent in it’s analog counterpart. This would be a 5-star killer app if the developers could combine the smooth handwriting with digital features like thumbnails.
Problems and Suggestions
1. The interface for switching notebooks is slow and clumsy. You have to scroll horizontally across your collection of notebooks, and every once in a while one of them flips open to preview the last page written, rather than scrolling by like I want it to. I want to use this for taking notes in meetings, and I created a separate notebook for each regular meeting, plus a notebook for non-regular meetings. But scrolling quickly to the notebook I want is difficult.
Suggestion: instead of the left-right scrolling interface with the title under each notebook, fill the screen with thumbnails of each notebook, and put the title on the notebook itself. This would make better use of the iPad screen space. Get rid of the flip-open preview since the left side page of the open notebook doesn’t have any writing on it anyway. Instead, preview the notebook with a single-tap by just changing the thumbnail from the notebook cover to a picture of the last written page. Double-tap to open the notebook and jump to the last written page.
2. Just like a paper notebook, you have to flip page by page to find something you wrote in the past. But quickly flipping pages is easier with real paper than it is on the iPad screen. Also, with a real notebook you can flip several pages at a time. When you look for something you wrote several weeks ago in a real paper notebook, you don’t flip back one page at a time. You start by flipping several pages, and as you think you’re getting close you start flipping page by page. But there’s no way to do this with this app, and actually there’s no need for this limitation on an electronic device like iPad. I’m afraid it will be impossible to quickly find something written several weeks ago in a notebook that has dozens of pages.
Suggestion: Add a “thumbnail view” button in the toolbar when you are inside a notebook. Allow the user to explode the notebook into a screen full of thumbnails of each page and scroll quickly to the desired page. This would completely eliminate the limitation of real paper notebooks, and make this app “better than paper.”
3. Wrist protection works great, but starts to fall apart toward the bottom of the page, especially the bottom right of the page. (I’m right-handed) I assume this is because my finger and my wrist get closer together as I try to squeeze text into the bottom corner.
Suggestion: Continue to tweak this, and and maybe make the tolerance greater towards the bottom of the page. Or give us a slider in the preferences to adjust the tolerance for ignoring the wrist.
All in all, this app is off to a great start. The next step is to keep the paper experience, but leave behind paper’s limitations. For note-taking on iPad to really take off, the apps have to be better than the real thing (paper notebooks). This app is just as good as real paper, which isn’t good enough. The iPad needs a replacement for paper that is better than paper, not just a digital copy of an analog notebook.
I’ve mailed the developers this review. I have high hopes for this app, so let’s see what future updates bring.
(this is a review of version 1.1 of the app)
