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Future of Penultimate?


gewappnet

Idea

There were no updates of Penultimate for a year now although there are lots of open issues:

  • Insufficient support for Apple Pencil: It is still possible to leave marks with the hands. The input should be Pencil only - like it is in GoodNotes - to avoid any unwanted marks.
  • Leaving the app (to the homescreen, to another app) and going back will bring you always to another page of the current note. Very annoying!
  • Lasso cut & paste leaves marks.

But on the other hand the functionality of Penultimate is not integrated fully in Evernote. So is there any future for Penultimate? Will there be any further updates? With the new iPad Pros and iOS 11 Apple Pencil became essential for note taking. As a subscriber of Evernote Premium I would like to know what is the answer of Evernote to this development.

 

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18 hours ago, gazumped said:

Sorry,  but it's unusual for the team to post any comments about current or future developments.  If you can raise a support ticket you'll get some personal feedback which might help...

As you wrote this, I was already in the process of chatting with support and getting answers in a formal ticket.  I appreciate Skylar's response (below), but it seems rather boiler-plate.  I mean according to the previous discussions in the past, these have been "known" issues for OVER A YEAR!  😲

From: support-webform@evernote.com
Subject: Ticket# 2774912 - Chat with Evernote on 2/11/2019
Date: February 11, 2019 at 3:36:51 PM CST

Skylar (Evernote Help and Learning)
Just following up after our chat, thank you for your patience.
To clear, these questions are associated with Penultimate, correct?

1) When using the select too, cutting or moving the selection causes it to leave artifacts behind that you have to then erase yourself.
This is known issue, I don't have an ETA of when it will be resolved, I can assure you we're working diligently to fix it.

2) No support for premium users.. with more than 250 notebooks.
Yes, at this time notebooks limit is 250 on Penultimate, but we are trying to increase more notebooks later, also I don't have an ETA of when it will be increase.

3) if you leave the app, and come back, your place in your notebook is lost, you have to figure out where you were.
Yes, This also known issue too. I can assure you we're working diligently to fix it.

4) Dynamic picture support? Once an image or photo is placed, you can not "edit" it, crop it, etc.. you can only place it.
This feature is not yet available, but I can see how a great addition to Evernote this feature would be and I think other users would find it helpful. I am happy to submit this as a feature request to our development team!

Evernote has always relied on our invested community in order to create a better product by actively listening to our users and their experiences.  While we are eager to implement these requests into action, we still operate on a small base of operations. Please understand that your input is being heard, and we hope to present you with an effective solution soon.  In the meantime, another great resource is our Evernote User Forum, where you and other users can join in the discussion, suggest new feature ideas, and vote for them. Our development team regularly reviews feedback submitted through our Forums in hopes of creating the best product and experience for our users.  At this time, I’m going to close your ticket. If you would like an update on where we are in the progress of this issue, please reply back to us and we will update you accordingly.  We are sorry for inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation.

I guess it is up to you Evernote community!  If you want these fixed, we will need to make sure there is enough interest in having this done, to move it closer on their radar.  Please submit tickets to Evernote with the issues above.  Feel free to add your own to the list. 

Edited by Greg Jewett
Bring specific text to more attention. Action items in red.
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On 19.6.2017 at 2:00 PM, DTLow said:

My preference is the Noteability app.  It supports a blend of typing, handwriting, and sketching

I'm also looking at Goodnotes which has an OCR feature

I'm not concerned much with automatic syncing.  The share menu makes it easy to save into Evernote in native or pdf format

But handwriting in PDFs is not recognized and indexed in Evernote, right? I could go with Notability, but what's the point of uploading manually each note to Evernote if it is not even searchable?

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Hi.  I think most folks use alternative apps now,  so with their recent history of cutting back on anything that doesn't support the 'core product' of storing and finding information Penultimate might be under some threat..  but by the same token Evernote have been re-coding their editor software for a couple of years now,  which (kind've) explains any lack of movement on Penultimate:  why develop two editors when you could merge the coding into one structure and make the feature an integral part of the overall product.

Clearly only Evernote knows what they plan,  but since explaining their future plans is a free gift of business intelligence to every competitor,  they tend not to do that.  You may get some response if you reach out to Support - directly if you're a paying customer on https://help.evernote.com/hc/requests/new or tweet them if not via https://twitter.com/evernotehelps

 

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44 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hi.  I think most folks use alternative apps now,

But which one? My understanding is that no third party app offers automatic syncing with Evernote (since the restriction on the API was introduced in 2012). So what is the intended way of taking handwritten notes (with Apple Pencil) in Evernote? Sketches within Evernote? Penultimate? Another app?

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3 hours ago, gewappnet said:

But which one? My understanding is that no third party app offers automatic syncing with Evernote (since the restriction on the API was introduced in 2012). So what is the intended way of taking handwritten notes (with Apple Pencil) in Evernote? Sketches within Evernote? Penultimate? Another app?

My preference is the Noteability app.  It supports a blend of typing, handwriting, and sketching

I'm also looking at Goodnotes which has an OCR feature

I'm not concerned much with automatic syncing.  The share menu makes it easy to save into Evernote in native or pdf format

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Could not agree more with you, @gewappnet. Penultimate automatically adds pages when you get to the end of the current one, and supports multiple page types, making it better than Evernote's "sketch", which is meant for a single-page sketch. And Penultimate's integration with Evernote, such that it is, is still better than any other note-taking apps' integration with Evernote. But the defects are seriously mounting.

@DTLow you've mentioned two features: OCR (and evernote's full text search) as well as autosync. Taking the whole package, I find Evernote/Penultimate is still more convenient for my use cases than Noteability and Goodnotes for longform note taking.

If Evernote is going to deprecate Penultimate, then they absolutely should open the API back up to the likes of Noteability/Goodnotes. It would mean more Premium subscriptions, surely.

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16 minutes ago, gewappnet said:

But handwriting in PDFs is not recognized and indexed in Evernote, right? I could go with Notability,

That's true, Evernote indexes handwriting in image files; not pdf files

>>but what's the point of uploading manually each note to Evernote if it is not even searchable?

I upload my data to Evernote because this is my vehicle for filing
If I need to find a document/data, I know I've stored it in Evernote

I've had limited success with handwriting OCR; possibly a  reflection of my poor handwriting
My process is

  • rely on intitle search; I make sure my titles are descriptive
  • transcribe my notes into typed content 
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I have the same problem. As a teacher I like to plan my lessons with handwriting notes. The missing sync drives me crazy. Tried so many Apps. Writing in Evernote with pencil doesn't feel good. Since a few days I have a new workflow.

Writing notes in MyScript Nebo (handwriting / pencil) -> export my notes as word document to Evernote -> it automatically transform my writing notes (99,9% perfect) into typed text, so I can edit this exported document with words. 

Not perfect. But ok.

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23 minutes ago, Andi123 said:

I have the same problem. As a teacher I like to plan my lessons with handwriting notes. The missing sync drives me crazy. Tried so many Apps. Writing in Evernote with pencil doesn't feel good. Since a few days I have a new workflow.

Writing notes in MyScript Nebo (handwriting / pencil) -> export my notes as word document to Evernote -> it automatically transform my writing notes (99,9% perfect) into typed text, so I can edit this exported document with words. 

Not perfect. But ok.

Thanks for the headsup!  Good looking app - would like to try it out but the Play store says it's incompatible with my Note 4 :(

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6 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Thanks for the headsup!  Good looking app - would like to try it out but the Play store says it's incompatible with my Note 4 :(

I think this thread is still about a replacement of Penultimate and handwriting with Apple Pencil. So per definition not for Android.

 

I tried Notability and GoodNotes and I think GoodNotes is currently the best Penultimate replacement. It includes a handwriting indexing and the exported PDFs include the recognized text as well, so they are searchable in Evernote. But of course the actual exporting of each note(book) to Evernote needs many taps. I really hope Penultimate is not completely dead and Evernote will come up with a update with complete Pencil support.

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1 hour ago, gewappnet said:

I think this thread is still about a replacement of Penultimate and handwriting with Apple Pencil. So per definition not for Android.

 

I tried Notability and GoodNotes and I think GoodNotes is currently the best Penultimate replacement. It includes a handwriting indexing and the exported PDFs include the recognized text as well, so they are searchable in Evernote. But of course the actual exporting of each note(book) to Evernote needs many taps. I really hope Penultimate is not completely dead and Evernote will come up with a update with complete Pencil support.

I also just discovered that with GoodNotes you can select your handwritten text, and it will convert it into typed text. You can then use the share button to import into Evernote.

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11 minutes ago, sa3oud said:

I also just discovered that with GoodNotes you can select your handwritten text, and it will convert it into typed text. You can then use the share button to import into Evernote.

Yes, but it is not needed. As I said, the normal PDF that is generated by GoodNotes contains the graphics of the writing AND the text. That's why the text of the handwritten PDF from GoodNotes is searchable in Evernote.

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1 hour ago, sa3oud said:

I also just discovered that with GoodNotes you can select your handwritten text, and it will convert it into typed text. You can then use the share button to import into Evernote.

My opinion is that Notability is more polished, but I use GoodNotes for its OCR feature.

I need to make corrections to the converted text because of my poor handwriting

On my iPad Pro, I open two window and transcribe my handwriting section by section.  For me, GoodNotes does 75% of the work in converting writing to text

 

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On 2017-06-22 at 1:54 PM, gewappnet said:

Yes, but it is not needed. As I said, the normal PDF that is generated by GoodNotes contains the graphics of the writing AND the text. That's why the text of the handwritten PDF from GoodNotes is searchable in Evernote.

You are right, it is actually more productive to export to pdf. I also noticed that you can export the document as a good notes document and save it into evernote. This is useful if you are still working on a task and want to add to your handwritten note.  So many possibilities when using both applications.

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On 6/19/2017 at 12:55 PM, gewappnet said:

Leaving the app (to the homescreen, to another app) and going back will bring you always to another page of the current note. Very annoying!

Lasso cut & paste leaves marks.

I just opened a bug report for the first one, was just about to open the second one for leaving marks, when I found this. So this has been brought to attention half a year ago and not fixed? The latest update (Dec 19, 2017) says it fixed writing in portrait mode offset. So something seems to be happening at least, but not these issues. Evernote, what do we have to do so you fix these other bugs? Showing the wrong page is the worst thing ever and doesn't seem to be a fix that would take more than a day. Please, fix this.

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Just pinging!  Has anyone heard anything from Evernote regarding the future of Penultimate?  I love it, but all the issues outlined above have not been fixed and with no updates in over a year usually it is on life-support and about to be discontinued.  It will work until it doesn't!   I really hope this is not the case here.   Evernote team?

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2 hours ago, Greg Jewett said:

I really hope this is not the case here.   Evernote team?

Sorry,  but it's unusual for the team to post any comments about current or future developments.  If you can raise a support ticket you'll get some personal feedback which might help...

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39 minutes ago, Greg Jewett said:

"I can assure you we're working diligently to fix it."

Wow, that is a new level of denial on their side if they think we'll buy that.

45 minutes ago, Greg Jewett said:

Please submit tickets to Evernote with the issues above.

Haha, this almost makes me want to open a new ticket every time I drag a selection and black dots remain and every time I re-open the app and it's on some random location in between pages. Do you think I can get banned for sending in a new ticket every day? 😆

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9 minutes ago, Matej 'Retro' Jan said:

Do you think I can get banned for sending in a new ticket every day?

Ever hear of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?  Be a shame if/ when you get a real issue that you need help with... 

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Last I checked crying wolf meant giving false alarm, which doesn't apply here since the bugs/issues are real. And if they can't fix even the smallest of bugs, I'm not sure what good it would do me when an even more serious issue came up.

But that's besides the point, since it was a joke.

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Just to follow up on the alternatives: NoteShelf 2 is really what Penultimate was supposed to be. It has the exact same Evernote sync functionality as Penultimate (read-only notes that are automatically updated), but it has full Apple Pencil support and more or less everything GoodNotes and Notability offer. If you are still waiting for a proper update of Penultimate wait no longer and go for NoteShelf 2.

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I have dumped Penultimate.   I have moved over to NoteShelf 2.   I have not looked back!  It works fantastic with the new iPad and Apple Pencil.   Ignores other movements and touches, only writes with the pencil, copy and paste works, note organization is ok, and a good tool.   If you are tied of waiting on Evernote to fix Penultimate .. this is the tool to move to!

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Just looked at their website..it looks great so I'm going to do the same by the looks of it.  Sad really but I ain't waiting any longer!

Update:  Now using Noteshelf2 - Its awesome.  Bye penultimate. 

Edited by DeanM.
Update
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I am coming back to penulitmate-it works fine and syncs back to EN. Aside from not playing well with the Apple Pencil Im loving the way it syncs back and forth to EN. All we need is for a better interface to EN. I didn download Noteshelf2 and regret now spending the money on that app. 

 

What am I missing?

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13 minutes ago, u352 said:

What am I missing?

There comes a point when you stop beating the dead horse and move on to a different animal

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21 hours ago, DeanM. said:

I bought Noteshelf 2 and it syncs perfectly with Evernote.  Everything about it beats Penultimate, I love it.

I’ll keep noodling with it. 

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4 minutes ago, u352 said:

How do you create an editable note in NS2? When I create the note in NS2 it is a locked note in EN? 

The Noteshelf integration with Evernote is exactly the same as the one of Penultimate. Therefore the created notes are NOT editable in Evernote - only in Noteshelf. This thread is about Penultimate and Noteshelf works as a replacement for Penultimate - in every way.

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Just as information: There has been reports that the sync from noteshelf into EN has gone bad sometimes. It seems that when the notes get very big (plenty of pages), this can cause hiccups. So if you want to use it, probably keep the notes short, and use more of them.

Personally I use GoodNotes 5 for note taking. No sync into EN, but exports as pdf, including OCR for searching in the handwritten notes.

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1 minute ago, PinkElephant said:

Just as information: There has been reports that the sync from noteshelf into EN has gone bad sometimes. It seems that when the notes get very big (plenty of pages), this can cause hiccups. So if you want to use it, probably keep the notes short, and use more of them.

Personally I use GoodNotes 5 for note taking. No sync into EN, but exports as pdf, including OCR for searching in the handwritten notes.

Sometimes the sync can take longer, but nothing gets lost. Way better than having to export manually every single note all the time like in GoodNotes and Notability. Export in these apps is not just a tap, it means several taps for each note. And if you change something in the note afterwards, you have to export it again and delete the first export. With Noteshelf (and Penultimate of course) you can edit a note in Noteshelf (Penultimate) as often as you want and every change will be automatically synced to the same note in Evernote.

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Right, the pdfs are as static as they are from other sources. What I like is that they carry their OCR info, and I can annotate them using the build-in EN tools to do so. I do not say it is the ideal workflow for everybody.

In my case, I keep the „living“ notes in GN5 for as long as they need to be appended and edited. GN has included a very good search function with ver.5, that will search all notebooks, not only one as before. For me, I prefer to have a separate handwriting app with a perfect iCloud-sync and other features I like, and have the additional step to export what I want to file away into EN.

For other use cases, the Noteshelf option is probably better, especially because Penultimate is a walking dead software, not able to even perform simple tasks offered by most other handwriting annotation apps.

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1 minute ago, PinkElephant said:

For other use cases, the Noteshelf option is probably better, especially because Penultimate is a walking dead software, not able to even perform simple tasks offered by most other handwriting annotation apps.

Yeah, I think that is the point. I used GoodNotes and Notability (both have PDF export with OCR). These are the reference note taking apps on the iPad, but for some reason they don't offer direct export to Evernote. If Evernote is your personal archive for everything, the transfer of handwritten notes in another app should be simple, fast and straightforward. Noteshelf is the only app besides the big disappointment Penultimate that offers a live sync to Evernote. And I was surprised to find out that Noteshelf is currently on par with GoodNotes and Notability. It is really an insider tip.

I hope all these apps (including Evernote!) will adapt fast the new functionalities of iPadOS. This will be a real game changer (opening multiple documents side-by-side!).

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Yes, waiting for this as well ! I hope for more changes, like having a local copy of the EN database on the ipad, being able to open several notes at once, join notes into one, do mass tagging and moving of notes etc like on the desktop clients. I have all my notebooks as offline copy, but it is not the same.

On the note taking, I have a personal policy of restricting my use of different apps for one purpose. It is o.k. If you have any of the good note taking apps when you search for content. I go to GN when I remember it was handwritten, and will find it pretty fast. When using several apps for the same purpose, it can be difficult.

GN has made it clear they will not make live export to any other services. This is a 10-people company, living on selling the app and not an abo model - so they probably do not want to dedicate a lot of their resources just to keep the interfaces up to date.

Noteshelf at the moment stands out with the „save-to-EN“ option, if you are a EN user.

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17 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

like having a local copy of the EN database on the ipad

Do-able with  "offline notebooks"  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005177-How-to-set-up-offline-notebooks-on-mobile-devices

>>but it is not the same...It just won’t help with the current restrictions of iOS: One note at a time, all the time.

The centre panel displays a list of notes

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Quote

 

Important Penultimate Notice
With Apple’s release of iPadOS, you will experience temporary usability issues with Penultimate if you choose to update to iPadOS now. You will still have the ability to launch the app, but you will be unable to create and save drawings until a new version of Penultimate is released.
We are working quickly to restore Penultimate’s functionality for iPadOS. In the meantime, here are some options:
•  Keep using your current iOS version on your iPad. This interruption only applies to iPadOS. Penultimate will continue to work with previous versions of iOS.
•  Download the Evernote app on iPad to get similar functionality. You’ll be able to:
•  Sketch directly on the screen using your finger or a stylus
•  Select from different pen tips and highlighter colors
•  Draw shapes and have them snap into place
•  Work on detailed drawings by pinching to zoom in
•  Save drawings as notes directly into your Evernote account
If you have NOT updated to iPadOS, we recommend waiting until a new version of Penultimate is released. This will ensure you can continue using all the features of Penultimate.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and we appreciate your patience. We’ll let you know as soon as an updated version of Penultimate is available for you to install.
Thanks,
Evernote Team

 

I got this message yesterday. They know they need to push an update. Let's see how long it takes. 

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Even if they fix each and any bug, it will be a far cry from any dedicated handwriting app I know.

Notability, Noteshelf or my favorite GoodNotes 5, they are all far ahead of what Penultimate has to offer.

Regarding GoodNotes 5, I just say one phrase: „Presentation Mode“ !

  • On the iPad !
  • Full Screen, window or just a selected part of it, while you have the information you want to present right beside it in split view. There it is visible only to yourself, not to the audience that follow on the large screen what you draw and write on your virtual white board. It has this WOW-appeal  !

Penultimate for me is not even on my list if I would consider picking a handwriting solution.

This does not mean to skip EN - once a note is taken and static, I export it as a pdf into EN (comes along with full OCR data, which means full searchability of my pretty individual handwriting in EN) and file it away there for future reference.

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