Say goodbye to your allowance with Penultimate’s new Paper Shop
Penultimate, my favorite handwriting app on the iPad, has just added the most dangerous new feature yet: a stationery store. Once I switched away from paper and pen, I thought my days of spending way too much money on beautiful stationary were over. I was wrong.
Penultimate’s strength is its simplicity (well, that and its great design). Essentially, it turns your iPad into a piece of paper. You can add pages to make books, choose nib size and color, and erase. And that’s about it. No handwriting recognition, no photo importing, no fanciness at all. The only technical feature is wrist protection which lets you rest your hand on the screen whilst writing.
The latest update adds in the Paper Shop. This lets you add many, many paper styles to the built in blank, lined and squared papers. Open it up (it’s found in the paper selection menu) and you’ll immediately be transported back to the stationary stores of your nerdy childhood, staring at shelf upon shelf of desirable office supplies, and only a few dollars on your pocket to spend.
Right now you can choose from various packs. My first purchase was Time & Tasks (13 papers), with to-do lists, shopping lists, invoices, memos and so on. You can also pick games (Tic Tac Toe etc.), Young Writers (with line guides to practice upper and lower case, and tall and short letters), the Design Collection (graph, quad and engineering), plus a Writing pack, with various lined stocks and storyboard templates. Finally, there is a music selection with staves, guitar tabs and more. This is the most expensive, at $6, with the cheapest at $1.
A couple of related features have been added, too. When exporting a note, you can now choose to export the paper along with it. And you can import your own backgrounds. Just come up with something that is 718 x 865 pixels, save it to the iPad’s camera roll and import from there. Soon the developer, Cocoa Box, will host a repository where people can share their designs.
This last is a genius move, and could make Penultimate the essential iPad writing app. Penultimate 3.0 is available now for $2.
Papers, papers, papers [Cocoa Box blog]
Penultimate product page [iTunes]
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