Uncover your notebooks

Custom covers and page reordering are here

Hello, dear users. We’ve been looking forward to sharing this with you for a long time: today, we’re releasing two of our most-requested features.

Make your own covers

You can now choose to use a page from your notebook as its cover.

In the ‘Cover Ideas’ section of each notebook’s options, you’ll find two new cover designs: the notebook’s last-viewed page and its first page. Choose the last-viewed page , and your notebook’s cover will always show your most recent work in it. Choose the first page option, and now you can go wild with a hand-drawn cover page for your work.

Both of these designs also allow you to customize (or remove entirely) the spine of the book.

Rearrange your pages, and more

We’ve given some careful attention to the notebook index page in this release. First of all, you can zoom out – especially helpful on smaller iPads:

See more of your notebooks’ pages at once with Penbook’s new page grid

The search functionality is more powerful, with a date selector for narrowing results to pages that are dated within a specified range:

Search within your notebook for pages dated within a range

Best of all, page rearrangement is here! Tap the ‘Edit’ button to reveal the new editing view, where you can use the drag handles to change the order of your notebook’s pages.

Penbook’s new edit screen lets you reorder the pages within your notebook.

That’s all for now! Well, not to minimize it. Signing off like that makes it sound like this wasn’t a big deal for us, but it was actually a fair amount of work. I had to test it on the 6 iPads that haunt my desk, and perform an offering to the Great Old One called “The Simulator”. Maybe it should be more like, “Hope you like it!” But – obviously, I do hope you like it – that still feels a bit liberal. It’s a point-release update to a note-taking app, not a meal I cooked for you with consideration paid to your gluten sensitivity. I’m not running an app update Sunday brunch here. In any case this email goes to thousands of people, and the intimacy pressed into the palms of consumers by craven Brands, like I’m talking to the singular You, is uncanny and gross. What’s the end game of that, anyway – is the grand prize that I get to run the Wendy’s Twitter account? And have my S-word-posts screencapped on normie subreddits?

Maybe “until next time!” – probably real people used to say to each other in real life, and now when I think of it, I see a newscaster or other talking head saying it solemnly at the end of their segment. The metaphor holds even though I’m not talking and you can’t see my head. That feels appropriate – something that used to be authentic, but has been soiled by commerce. That is what we do here after all (commerce, not soiling), and there’s always a ‘next time’ with newsletters, that’s the entire point. Alright! Good enough.

Later skater,

Team Penbook