Evernote announced this morning that they have acquired Penultimate – a popular handwriting app for iPad. This marks the second major acquisition by Evernote, having purchased Mac screen sharing app Skitch last year, integrating it into Evernote and creating Skitch for iPad
Fortunately, Penultimate won’t be going away anytime soon. As with the company’s previous acquisition of Skitch, Evernote promises to keep Penultimate around as a separate app under the same name, but will gain deeper integration with Evernote.
Penultimate is hugely popular. In fact, according to Apple, it’s the #4 best-selling paid iPad app of all time. When you have such a great product, the last thing you want to do is mess with it. That’s why Penultimate creator, Ben Zotto, is joining Evernote to head up future app development. Penultimate will stay a separate, elegant application and will get many much-requested Evernote-y improvements including full search and synchronization. Ben will also lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms, so you’ll see handwriting cross-pollination popping up everywhere.
Evernote has been putting a great deal of money and effort into expanding their available services and apps, and acquiring Penultimate, which is consistently one of the top apps of its kind on the App Store, seems to be a particularly solid move for the company.
As of now, Penultimate is available for $0.99 in the App Store (link). You can check out our review of Penultimate here.