Penultimate the handwriting and for the iPad

Whilst I was looking at the handwriting recognition application Phatpad, I also came across another application, which is touted as the bestselling handwriting app for iPad, over the last year. But when it comes down to making a comparison between the two applications for the iPad, there are quite a lot of differences. The main difference is that Phatpad is a handwriting recognition application, whereas Penultimate is for writing and keeping it as handwriting. So if you have terrible handwriting style and you want something that will convert that illegible script of yours, into something attractive and readable, then Phatpad would be the better option.

With Penultimate you can store your thoughts in a handwritten format within named notebooks, for a topic, a project or a category. There seems to be no limit on the number of notebooks that you can create, or the number of pages that you can have within a notebook. It is possible to sort your notebooks and scroll through them within a fast grid type of view. It is simple to browse through your pages, inserting, deleting, duplicating or reordering of pages as you see fit.

Penultimate iPad is in The Apple iPad App Store

The application Penultimate iPad can be found in the Apple iPad application store and it is priced at $1.99. When you get started using the Penultimate iPad application there is information stored within a welcome notebook, so that you can find out about the main features of the application. They claim that you will be scribbling and whizzing within your pages and note books very soon, after starting to use Penultimate, and in my case it certainly will be scribble.

You can send a single page image or a full notebook in the PDF format and other iPad users that have Penultimate, will be able to collaborate with you on any of your shared notebooks. It is suggested, that if you use the iPad with the VGA video adapter you will be able to will to show your notes on a screen or with a projector, I don’t think I would like to show my horrible handwriting to too many people.

Custom Paper Styles in Penultimate iPad

Within Penultimate iPad you can use colour or you may use black ink on the photorealistic paper that you will find within the application. There is also an effective eraser tool that somehow, is always the correct size to rub out any errors that you have made. You may also import images to be able to have custom paper types that you can write on and also do drawings upon. Penultimate is one of those applications that would benefit from the use of a stylus for the iPad, the Boxwave stylus would be an excellent choice to use for your writing and drawing here.

This penultimate application for the iPad in the right hands, could be an excellent tool for making sketches, taking notes, displaying ideas digitally and for working things out prior to sharing them with other people. Personally I think I will stick with Phatpad, SimpleNote, Nebulous Notes, plus one or two other note taking applications that I keep on my iPad.