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iPad Handwriting Apps: Penultimate and Noteshelf Receive Major Updates

We often cover Dropbox-enabled text editors and word processors here at MacStories, but we’ve been keeping an eye on handwriting apps as well, a category of software that has seen a huge rise in popularity and user adoption since the release of the iPad. Two personal favorites of mine in this space (and admittedly the biggest players on the App Store, too), Penultimate and Noteshelf, have been recently updated with major new functionalities that dramatically improve the usability and performances of these apps.

Penultimate, which we have covered quite a few times in the past, reached version 3.3 adding direct Dropbox and Evernote integration, Dropbox backups and an “Open In” menu to send notebooks to other installed iOS applications. Penultimate can now send notebooks or individual pages to Dropbox or Evernote; in Evernote, the service’s OCR capabilities for images will make sure your notes will also be fully searchable (that is, unless you really have bad handwriting that OCR can’t analyze). The Dropbox backup option, available in Settings, allows you to always keep the most recent versions of your notes backed up the cloud.

Other improvements in Penultimate 3.3 include bug fixes and possibility of pasting ink copied from other apps (I couldn’t get this to work with either Noteshelf or Bamboo Paper). Overall, Penultimate remains a fantastic iPad handwriting app with one of the finest inks I’ve seen on the platform and now proper cloud-based features to get your notes out of your device. Penultimate is just $0.99 on the App Store.

Noteshelf, another app we’ve covered on MacStories before, has been updated to version 5.0 adding the most requested functionality: text. You can now tap anywhere on the screen, and bring up the iPad’s touch keyboard to start typing text alongside your handwritten notes and sketches. Unlike Penultimate, Noteshelf is jam-packed with features: aside from notebook themes and several page designs (also available in the in-app store), Noteshelf comes with highlighters and smiley faces that can be embedded in a document, page search (limited to typed text) and tagging (new in version 5.0). Starting from the interface, Noteshelf seems to appeal to a different kind of iPad user than Penultimate, one that is looking for many powerful functionality rather than the focused simplicity of Penultimate. Noteshelf undoubtedly comes with many functionalities, and the page toolbar UI can be a little disorienting at first. However, the new features introduced in 5.0 make up for the slightly more cluttered UI, which just needs some time to get used to.

Noteshelf is a very powerful piece of software, available at $4.99 on the App Store.

Skype 5.5 Beta Released with New Call UI, Call Answering and Quality Improvements

The folks over at Skype have been hard at work on the next version of Skype 5.5 Beta for Mac and today they have released a new version of the app that adds some very nice functionality. Among the new features you will find a tweaked call interface that provides quick and easy access to several new features.

The improved discoverability of Skype’s Call allows Mac users to easily mute their microphone, send video, share their screen, send files and even add more people during a call.

They have also added the ability to accept calls with or without video which will certainly be a welcomed addition to Mac app. Various optimizations including an increase in call quality and stabilization were also reported to have been improved in this release.

Skype 5.5 Beta for Mac is available for download on their website.

Quick Review: Consume As An Online Usage Monitor

Consume, a beautiful app by Bjango (iStat Menus, Sideways Racing) is a “versatile usage monitor” that allows you to check on stats for your mobile phone, broadband, and rewards cards, as well as check on package deliveries and various “clubs” supported worldwide. Consume is a beautiful app and from what I hear it works amazingly well in tracking usage for iPhones and iPads; however, I can’t use the app as intended because the carriers I’m subscribed to (3 on my iPhone, TIM on my iPad) aren’t supported by Consume. I’ve always wanted to use Consume, but couldn’t.

Fortunately, with version 2.0 of the app (released a few weeks ago), Bjango has given me a reason to start using the app that I bought last year, hoping that someday 3 and TIM would show up in the list of supported providers. Besides getting a universal version with iPad support and iCloud sync for settings (it’s great), Consume 2 adds better support for package tracking, better handling of multiple accounts, and background provider updating. This means that, combined with the online services already supported in Consume, I’ve found a way to not only simply enjoy the app, but actually make it useful for me.

I use Consume to track shipments, check on my SKY account and available space across all my Gmail accounts, Evernote, and Dropbox. The interface is elegant, simple, and makes it a pleasure to see how much space I’m consuming on Evernote this month (I’m a Premium subscriber). Shipments are laid out with nicely designed icons and menus and, overall, the whole interface of Consume features pretty pixels all over.

Do I wish Consume 2 worked with more Italian carriers? Sure. Maybe someday it will. Right now, I’m just happy I can use this beautiful app with a few functionalities that have a certain usefulness to me.

Consume 2 is $2.99 on the App Store.

How I Rediscovered Zite

Often overlooked by iOS geeks in favor of Apple’s iPad app of 2010, Flipboard, Zite is a great “personalized news service” that I had ignored too, but started using a lot more recently. It has become an essential piece in my daily news consumption and discovery worlkflow, even more so than Flipboard which, unfortunately, is still largely based (at least on the iPad) on presenting content from your social streams in a new way, not necessarily making new content surface. That’s where Zite “clicked” for me.

Last year, one of the biggest trends of the App Store and software developers was that of launching “social magazines” and “personalized newspaper-like experiences” that leveraged social networks and your online friends to display content (articles, videos) in a new format. After Flipboard came out on the iPad and quickly captured the tech press’ hearts and eyeballs with a beautiful design and fresh approach to Twitter and Facebook, dozens of more or less similar services popped out promising to offer a better experience than Flipboard. Among them was Zite – at least I thought – and I easily dismissed the app as yet another take on the category that Flipboard created. Sometimes it’s good to be wrong, and I surely was.

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ZeroNinetyNine’s Second Mac App Store 24-Hour “Bundle”

ZeroNinetyNine had great success with its first bundle, which we covered last month. In the first ZeroNinetyNine deal, 11 apps from 8 independent developers participated. During the 24 hours of December 1, 2011, every app in ZeroNinetyNine received a place in the Top 20 of Paid Apps in US Mac App Store, and also conquered the tops of Mac App Stores in France, Russia, China, Canada, UK - all over the world. Partners in ZeroNinetyNine sold more than 100,000 apps in just 24 hours! These are very good numbers and now they are trying to do better by offering a second “bundle.”

The second ZeroNinetyNine 24-hour “bundle” includes 12 apps for 99¢ before they return back to their everyday prices. Since the Mac App Store doesn’t allow apps to be bundled and sold together, ZeroNinetyNine has found a unique way to do so by designing a well-designed holding page with all the applications in their “bundle”. Several independent developers have simultaneously dropped the price of their apps for one day sale on Mac App Store for just 99¢ per app.

The apps that are included in this one-day 99¢ sale are:

Some of the apps retail for as much as $34.99.

If you have a few dollars sitting around or some iTunes credit left over from the holidays, check out these killer deals. Also, be sure to sign up on the ZeroNinetyNine page to be notified when the next deal will be coming out.

A5 Jailbreak “A Matter Of Days”

According to a new blog post published by jailbreak hacker pod2g, the long awaited jailbreak for A5 devices (iPad 2, iPhone 4S) should be “a matter of days” now. The blog post reveals that developers @planetbeing and @saurik (the creator of Cydia, marketplace for unofficial iOS apps) made their contributions to finding an exploit for the A5 chip, which has been a major issue for hackers trying to figure out a way to hack into Apple’s system in the past months.

pod2g, creator of the iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak for A4 devices, notes that there “should be nothing left” blocking the release of the A5 version. A precise release date, however, hasn’t been provided in the blog post.

For updates, you can head over pod2g’s blog and Twitter account. The A5 jailbreak has seen a “dream team” of hackers like Saurik, Planetbeing, pod2g, MuscleNerd (iPhone Dev Team) and p0sixninja (Chronic Dev Team) working together to find a way to break out of Apple’s sandbox and release a public version of the jailbreak.

Sonora Public Beta Now Available

Just a few hours ago I listed Sonora, a new music player for OS X, among the new Mac apps to watch in 2012. I did not know Sonora was ready for the public beta, which is now available for everyone.

Being a beta, don’t expect the app to not crash sometimes, display strange errors, and lack the amount of polish you’d expect from a finished product. Still, some functionalities exclusive to Sonora have already been implemented and they’re working: full-screen mode for Lion, built-in Last.fm scrobbling, iTunes importing, music and queue controls from the top bar. I particularly appreciate the design of the icons in the navigation bar, which is very iOS-like for some reason (same for the popover controls). Songs you add to Sonora’s queue can be rearranged, or you can clear the queue entirely. The app supports Growl notifications and album artwork can be embedded in the song metadata.

That’s it for the first public beta of Sonora. Clearly we still don’t have an iTunes competitor here – the road ahead is very long when you consider the amount of stuff you can do with iTunes – but Sonora 0.6 shows some interesting ideas with a lot of potential. We’ll be following the development of this app in the next months very closely.

Download Sonora’s first public beta here.