Pull up a chair conformation
New stationery, and a little teaser, too.
After several requests for organic chemistry paper, we’ve shipped it in our latest update. It includes two conformations (planar/hex and chair) and some very useful options, like hiding and showing vertices. Here’s our preview page for the new iPad chemistry stationery, or peep this screenshot:
Speaking of stationery previews, we’re trying a new thing: our complete list of iPad stationery can be previewed on our website now, with space for your feedback. Feedback is really important to us for stationery development: we will literally make any stationery that more than one person asks for. It’s a lot more fun than ‘bug fixes and performance improvements’.
Speaking of speaking of things: speaking of performance improvements, we’re working on a huge UI overhaul. We noticed that it’s hard to move from the writing experience to the home screen of the app, which we chalked up to a confusing navigation hierarchy. We’ve simplified it by making the app into a series of ‘slates’. It’s more consistent, faster, and easier to learn than the current UI, and we can’t wait to release it. The writing experience itself, and the stationery picker, haven’t changed, so the habits you have there won’t need to be relearned. Check out this little concept video:
By the way, remember the ‘iSlate’? Let’s talk about that for a second. Everyone in 2010 thought the iPad was going to be called ‘iSlate’ or ‘iTablet’, or even ‘Newton’. People were so mad at the ‘iPad’ name when it was announced! Now that the iPad is 10 years old, this is all forgotten. It’s like if you named your baby ‘Burt’ in 2010. Burt would be a ten-year-old boy now, he’d be on a soccer team or be a Minecraft streamer or something, and everyone would have forgotten how goofy his name is, since his lightness, his shining young soul, his youth in its probing for the boundaries of his startling, inherited world, all this would have painted over his goofball name in the minds of everyone who knew him. As for his cohort, they would think his name totally normal; it would actually evaporate in his friends’ minds, and only the sum of his traits and acts would matter in their accounting of him. And that would in fact be true of everyone who knew him: his teachers, extended family, neighbors – whenever you mentioned him, that lad, Burt, they’d think of their industrious, bouncing, intricate boy, the one who walked their dog one weekend or asks tough questions in class or once settled a misbehaving toddler at a family dinner, and these close people would not give even a glance to his unnecessarily weird name. But still, one day you meet someone new, like a new coworker or whatever, and they ask you what your kid’s name is, and you start to sweat, you steel yourself, you’re like Abraham on Moriah now except no one’s stopping you, and you look your coworker in the eye, and in a haggard whisper you give breath to the name-crime you committed a long decade ago and confess, “…Burt.” Your coworker might try to be polite about it, but now you both know what you did.
But there are like 300 million iPads! So everyone loves ‘iPad’ now.
Ciao,
–Team Penbook