Penultimate - v1.2

Penultimate is a simple iPad notebook app for hand-written notes and sketches, but, despite its popularity, it is not your best option. Its biggest limitations are: the inability to zoom (which causes me to fit only a few strokes in any given page) and lack of any real document management

Rating: Price: $2.99


What's Good
Penultimate is the most popular hand-written note iPad application. It is a very simple and well designed app. Penultimate does one thing: allows you to hand write your notes.
The main screen design is very similar to Pages and Keynote apps on the iPad. From this screen you can browse all your notebooks in a scrollable view. From here you can delete or share a selected notebook. Double click will open the selected notebook for editing.


This is the first program I tried that had a wrist protection. I love this feature and it makes hand writing with a iPad pen much easier.


There is an option controlling this feature, so make sure it is on!
From the same option popup you can control were to display tools on your page.

In the last update Penultima has introduce a new Pen tool, that finally allows to select thickness and color.
I prefer writing with the thin line, to fit more notes in one page.


Penultimate offers 3 different paper types. I personally prefer Paper Plain, but also the other 2 are not too bad.


The appearance of the ink is very pleasing, it has very smooth corners and a variable thickness that simulates very well traditional ink-writing.


What's Bad
Penultima displays a large right margin, only in landscape view, for scrolling the page. I found this feature very disappointing for two reasons.
First, I was extremely sad to loose such a large portion of the screen, which I would have preferred to use for writing or zooming.
Second, this feature doesn't work well with wrist protection. My wrist kept scrolling accidentally. It was completely impossible for me to work in this view.


Penultima doesn't allow zooming, which imposes to create large notes, filling up the page very quickly.
Export options are very limited. You can email the current page or an entire notebook.


There is no option to organize your notes in any way. I can't see myself using this app for lots of notes. I would end-up with hundreds of notebooks in a long scrolling list, or with few notebooks with hundred of pages.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
YouTube video review of Penultimate
Penultimate on the iTune App Store

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Note Taker HD

Note Taker HD is a simple iPad app for taking hand written notes. Except for the auto-scroll (which is indeed very nice) I couldn't find a reason why I would use this app. It has very limited features and nothing looks good about it, not even your notes.

Rating: Price: $4.99


What's Good
Note Taker HD has two editing modes.
Edit1 mode allows to zoom in and out and write everywhere on the document.


Edit2 mode presents a split screen, similar to FastFinga: full document above, and detail area below. In this mode Note Taker offers a brilliant auto-scroll feature. Auto-scroll allows you to write in the zoom area in a continuous stream, without additional actions. It takes a little while to get used to this behavior, but it can really speed up your hand writing. You can watch this YouTube movie from the author, to fully understand the behavior.


Finally, a view mode allows you to pan and zoom, without the risk to leave unwanted marks on your note.


If you tap on the Done button, Note Taker will navigate to a view which displays the list of pages. If you tap on the tools button on this view, you will get a number of tools to manage your pages.


If you tap and hold on any one of any the thumbnails, you will get a popup with a list of actions you can perform on the page.


What's Bad
The use of real-estate is horrible. When working with the split screen (Edit2), Note Taker takes a lot of space for too many controls. In particular, the zoom area is much less wide of what you wish, and it requires lot of scrolling. Sure, the auto-scroll makes it easier, but you still have to move your finger (or pen) from right to left to continue writing on the same line.

Note Taker supports only blank ink in one fixed pen size, which, is a little too thin.

Note Taker doesn't support anything besides hand written notes; no pictures or text.

The ink is thin and looks very jagged. This is also true when writing in a large zoomed view, and then zooming out. It seems impossible to get any sort of decent looking lines.

I personally don't like this light green paper color. Most of note apps I tried provide more attractive and crisp looking paper (see FastFinga and Sundry Notes for example).

You can edit the default thumbnail associated with the page. Unfortunately this is not a very intuitive process. I had to watch the author's video to discover that feature, contrary to my assumptions I had to resize the document to fit into the thumbnail, and not the other way around.

I appreciate the feature, but it requires more effort that what I am willing to make, given the functionality.

Other minor observations.
A small button below the document allows scrolling, but I don't know why I would need it, since I can always use the two finger gesture to do it. Finally, I don't think I have ever seen a REDO button before the UNDO one.


Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
You can watch this YouTube video from the author to see this app in action.
Note Taker HD Overview
Note Taker HD on the iTune App Store

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Adobe Ideas

Adobe Ideas is simple and nicely designed electronic sketchbook, plus it is free, which makes it a must download. Give it a serious try - I actually discover this app while looking on it more in depth while writing this review, and this is, now, one of my favorite apps! And don't forget to zoom, while you are sketching, which for me was the key of success.

Rating: Price: FREE


What's Good
Don't overlook Adobe Ideas. It is a simple, yet great drawing app.


It provides 3 modes: pen, eraser and pan, and it has an apparently infinite undo stack.
Within the pen mode, you can select: size, opacity and color.
For both size and opacity, a slider allows to change the value.
For colors, you can pick one of the 5 color from the default palette, or select one of your custom different palette.


I love the way Adobe Ideas enables to create custom palette.
From the organize page you can select the colors tab...


... which displays all the palette you had defined.
From here you can then pick an image from your photo album. Adobe Ideas will extract main colors and create your new shining palette. The selected colors are highlighted in your picture. I wish I could drag the pickers around, but all in all, in am very pleased with the choices Adobe Ideas makes.
The best way to use this app is to make heavy use of zoom - that, at least, was what made all the difference for me.


If you want to work in full mode, a small button on the top left corner allows to hide the tool palette.


A layer button, on the left bottom corner, displays the two layers this app provides. You can have a photo and a draw layer, which enables to trace or annotate pictures.


You can duplicate Ideas by tapping on the double pen icon on the top right corner of the Organize page. This is essential when you want to produce variations of the same drawing.


The best way to use this app, is to make heavy use of the zoom while sketching - this made all the difference for me. The way that Adobe Ideas renders and scales your strokes is the most impressive feature of this app. Your strokes become nice and smooth. You can zoom infinitely, in and out, and your strokes will always look amazing!


What's Bad
Export options are basically nonexistent, not even export to the photo album. The only way to use your work outside this app is to email it! This is pretty much the biggest shortfall (and it's not a small one) of this app.

The two layers, dedicated respectively to sketch and photo, tickled my desire for more layer capabilities.

As for all iPad drawing apps, I miss the capability to cut and paste, and move around portion of my sketch. I am the only one that makes heavy use of this functionality when creating electronic drawing?

A couple of a minor design flaws.
First. Changing color and size takes one more click then what I wish. I appreciate the design of this app, which preserve the real-estate for the drawing area, but I wish I could change my pen attributes in one click.
Second. I keep running into this error. I tap on a color from a different swatch, assuming that I am selecting both swatch and color. When I start sketching and then realize that the color hasn't changed, only the swatch was selected.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
Draw & share with Adobe Ideas for iPad
Adobe Ideas on the iTune Apple Store

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Sundry Notes

Sundry Notes is a note application for the iPad that allows to mix text, photos, voice and web and more. Sundry Notes was clearly designed for someone writing math notes, and maybe this category of user can better appreciate some of its features. Overall this app is on the complex side, and I wish the developers had invested more time on polishing basic features (e.g. mail as PDF), and less time adding marginally useful features (as the equation solver or the symbols).

Rating: Price: FREE


What's Good
Sundry Notes supports many different input sources that can be collaged in a single, multiple-pages, document.

The text has the basic formatting controls, which work globally on the text box (e.g. color, size, bold, italic, bulleted and numbered lists).


When working on the whiteboard there are a number of shapes you can add, including lines and shapes with text.

The line can snap to the corners and to the middle points of the shapes, which allows to create diagrams.

All objects can be selected edited and repositioned.
Non text objects can be copied and locked and scaled using two finger pinch.

An unusual piece of functionality is the option to disabled the spell checker. I guess this feature was designed for math expressions, if you don't want to be bothered by the app trying correcting your variable names!

Another unusual piece of functionality is the Equation Solver. You can add an expression to your note ...

... and when you tap on the expression box, a calculator appears, allowing you to edit the expression.

I am usually not big fun of functionalities which I cannot fully justify, but I have to admit, this one is pretty cool.

What's Bad
Even if this app provides basic text formatting, this affects the entire text box, which means: to get real formatted text you need to create separated boxes! You can then group different text objects in one rasterized image, but your text loses the ability to be edited! This approach makes formatting pretty useless. It is a lot of work ... I would rather type my notes in plain text.

Text boxes can be resized by dragging a small arrow on the top right corner. Due to the small size of the dragging target it is pretty difficult to trigger the resize. I wish the developers had adopted the same resizing approach used for other objects.


I may be missing something but I don't get why they have added the symbols library. These components have very poor usability and I see more pain than advantages in trying to use them.


I am really puzzled why delete and merge don't appear on the contextual popup. At first I couldn't figure out how to delete my items. For some reason I totally missed the large two buttons on the toolbar, maybe because they had a completely different nature form all the other buttons there?


There is an undo in the Whiteboard mode, but it only allows 3 undo steps. This is unacceptable for a hand free sketching mode, where you may do many strokes in a second.

I wish there was a setting to suppress the many confirmation dialogs this app displays. And, yes ... I am sure I want to delete the selected item ... I swear.


This app hasn't been designed (or at least tested) to work well in landscape mode. Many of the dialogs appear below the keyboard. This is not the end of the world, but it can be quite annoying.


I found Sundry Notes to be pretty buggy. After syncing it crashed when I try to open one of the notes I had. Also, when mailing a multi-page note you end up with a PDF with all blank pages, except for your current page at the moment of emailing. This is so sad. I had a 3 pages note, and I have to emailed it 3 time ending up with 3 PDFs in my inbox, all of which had 3 pages, 2 of which where blank :(


Overall this may sound awkward to some, but I think this app has too many features that aren't really useful, and, more importantly, they are frustrating when you try to used them. This affected negatively my rating. The most disappointing feature, in this respect, is the library of symbols. I assumed it should help you writing math expressions, but these symbols are NOT integrated with the text, and they are so small that the pinch gesture to resize doesn't work. So, you place the symbol in the canvas, with quite some challenge you may be able to positioned where you like ... then what? It is still going to be a separate entity from you text, which means you have to perform the positioning separately, unless you group everything as a rasterized image that you then cannot edit. Well ... what a waste.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
Sundry Notes has a web site that you can check for more more information. The site also features a pretty nicely done video of the app.
http://sundrynotes.com/
Sundry Notes on the iTune Apple Store

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