Cocoa Box’s Penultimate, the beautifully simple handwriting app for iPad, has been one of our favorites pretty much since it came out two years ago, so we’re very thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired the company and that Penultimate is now part of the Evernote family!

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.

We couldn’t be more excited that Penultimate is joining Evernote. Our team has been working on handwriting recognition and digital ink forever and it feels like for the very first time, the experience of writing on a tablet is actually great. That’s what Penultimate has done. Now that we can add Evernote’s technology and expertise, it’s about to get a lot more powerful. Just wait till you see what we’ve got in store.

Penultimate is available for $0.99 from the iTunes App Store.