Penultimate revolutionizes capitalism by charging for images of blank paper [Update: no they don’t]
Update: Penultimate makes some changes
Penultimate is an iPad app that annoys me quite a bit. While it has the best looking handwriting in any app I’ve seen because of its writing speed features, it is ridiculously underfeatured in every other respect. Forget a magnified writing mode or even the ability to zoom, forget document import and annotation, forget OCR, PDF export, and pretty much every single feature that makes apps like smartNote and Notify useful. Yet it has a huge following, because of…something….probably a domino effect of being high up in iTunes. Anyways, today I got an update notice with what they promised was a huge update. The only way this update is huge is if you think the app is impressive to begin with.
The new update added the ability to import and buy more paper types. Technically this could be used for importing documents, if you do it one page at a time via the photo library. However the real point of the feature is to get things like todo list and sheet music templates to write on. A good idea in itself, until you see the price. You’d think that an app that costs the same as apps with 100 times the features would add updates for free, especially when the update is just a bunch of images of paper, but no. The “paper packs” range in price from $1 to $5, with the entire collection racking up a total of $14. Again, I like the idea, but seriously- $14 for a bunch of images of paper? That is low on a level you can’t get to without a TBM.
