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Pen Friend
Handwritten iPad notes that land on your Mac instantly
Most iPad note apps are notebooks: they hold a page beautifully and then you export it. Pen Friend is a workflow across both devices. Flick a page and it is on your Mac. A Mac screenshot lands back on the page a second later, ready to annotate. Ask your question on the page instead of leaving for a browser. Lay tracing paper over anything. Write the search word with the pencil and it finds pages by what they were about, not what you named them. Pages file themselves. The Mac half is free.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
I write by hand. Not for the aesthetic, it is just how I think. The problem was never the writing, it was everything after it: the page sits on the iPad and the real work happens on the Mac, and between the two there is always an export, an AirDrop, a folder to go hunting for.
So Pen Friend started as one thing. Flick a page and it is on your Mac. A Mac screenshot comes back the other way and lands on the page, ready to annotate.
What I did not expect was how much it changed once I used it every day. Two things came out of that:
Tracing paper. You lay a sheet over a screenshot or a PDF and work in the margins right next to the thing, instead of having to choose between the image and your notes.
Asking on the page. Circle something, ask, and the answer arrives in ink. That came from noticing how often I left the iPad to look something up, and lost the page every single time.
The search surprised me too. You write the search word with the pencil, and it matches the words read off your ink as well as what each page turned out to be about. I find pages by what I was thinking now, not by what I named them.
The Mac companion is free, and you need both halves for the flick to work.
If you write by hand: what still makes you leave the page?
About Pen Friend on Product Hunt
“Handwritten iPad notes that land on your Mac instantly”
Pen Friend was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 2 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #112 on the daily leaderboard. Most iPad note apps are notebooks: they hold a page beautifully and then you export it. Pen Friend is a workflow across both devices. Flick a page and it is on your Mac. A Mac screenshot lands back on the page a second later, ready to annotate. Ask your question on the page instead of leaving for a browser. Lay tracing paper over anything. Write the search word with the pencil and it finds pages by what they were about, not what you named them. Pages file themselves. The Mac half is free.
On the analytics side, Pen Friend competes within Mac, Productivity and Notes — topics that collectively have 775.1k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Pen Friend performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Pen Friend?
Pen Friend was hunted by Bishwas Bhandari. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Pen Friend including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Bishwas Bhandari