You think better with a pen, but the things you need never sit on the page. The answer you're stuck on, the note from last week you can't find, the PDF that lives on your Mac. Every one of them means putting the Pencil down and going somewhere else, and by the time you're back the thought has mostly gone.
Pen Friend is a notebook for iPad and iPhone Duo that writes back, and waits until you ask. Write by hand with Apple Pencil, end a line with a question mark and pause, then tap it, and the answer gets written beside your question in handwriting, like someone leaned over and helped. Nothing pops up while you write and nothing rewrites your page.
A REAL NOTEBOOK FIRST
Most of the time you just want to write, so that part had to feel right.
• One smooth canvas that stays crisp however far you zoom
• Real pages you turn, not an endless canvas
• Grid, lined, dotted or blank paper, in five page sizes
• On iPhone Duo it has its own layout, folded or open
• Double tap to paste, and export a worklog as a PDF or a page as an image
WHEN YOU ASK
• Ask on the page, or on tracing paper laid over it so your page stays clean
• A worked step for the line you're stuck on
• A labelled sketch, or a graph plotted from what you wrote
• A page of maths copied as LaTeX, ready for your document
WHEN THE PAGES PILE UP
Handwritten notes are lovely right up until you need to find one.
• Your home is a wall of your pages, whole, with the list one tap away
• To do gathers every page with a box still open
• Write your search by hand, and it finds worklogs by what they mean, not only the words in them
• Every worklog typed up as clean text, headings and all, with a short briefing of where it stands
• It sorts your worklogs into folders, and nothing moves until you approve it
WITH YOUR MAC
• Flick a page and paste it on your Mac, no extra app needed
• With the free Pen Friend Companion, drop a PDF or a screenshot on the notch and it lands on your page, mark it up and send it back
• Everything you send waits on the Mac in case you want it again
ON IPHONE
• Every page you wrote, to read, search and file when the iPad stays at home
YOURS
• No account, no ads, no tracking. It opens straight to a page.
• Your notes live on your device, backed up to your own iCloud
• Lock a folder, and only Touch ID, Face ID or your passcode opens it
The answers, briefings, clean text, search by meaning and sorting are written by Google's Gemini. Settings tells you in plain words what leaves your device.
WHY I MADE IT
I take notes by hand on an iPad while I work on a Mac, and I built Pen Friend so the page and the Mac could talk. Then grad students wrote asking for PDFs, so 1.2 was mostly that. This one is about the page itself: asking it things, finding things on it, and writing on more than one device. If something's wrong or missing, write to yo@bishwas.net. I read all of it.
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