31 January 2013 bzamayo.com/penultimate-goes-free MacStories, reviewing Evernote 4.0:
I appreciate the convenience of seeing Penultimate notes on the desktop, but I believe that search will turn out to be many peoples’ favorite addition in this update. By using handwriting recognition on the Evernote servers, Penultimate is capable of letting you find what you wrote through a search box. In practice, as someone with terrible handwriting, I noticed Penultimate couldn’t find my notes unless I wrote with block letters. I am comforted by the fact that Evernote’s own blog post shows the same kind of handwriting in the section about text recognition. Handwriting recognition is still hard. They also mention that the servers need a few minutes to process handwriting, and I can confirm that’s the case with Penultimate 4.0. Once it’s processed, I really like how results are highlighted in yellow directly on the pages that match your search query.
Penultimate was a great app when it was independent. Now, it has search (via handwriting recognition that happens on Evernote’s servers) and is free. This is an example of an acquisition gone well.