Get handwritten iPad notes onto your Mac in a second
Most of what people write about by hand is on a Mac screen: a bug, a chart, a page of a paper. Getting it onto the iPad usually means AirDrop, accept, find it in Files, insert it. Getting the page back is the same trip in reverse. Pen Friend and its free Mac companion make each direction one step.
A Mac screenshot, onto the iPad page
Take a screenshot on the Mac and it lands on the page you are writing on about a second later, ready to circle and annotate with the Pencil. There is no paste dialog to allow and nothing to AirDrop.
The finished page, back on the Mac
When the page is done, flick it, and the whole page is on the Mac clipboard: the typed text and the page images, ready to paste into a doc, a ticket or a chat. Your worklogs are mirrored to the Mac as well, so you can read them at your desk.
PDFs arrive as pages
Drop a PDF on the Mac app and it arrives on the iPad as real pages you can write between, not a flat picture, with the text blocks placed where they actually sit. Mark it up with the Pencil and send it straight back to the Mac as a PDF.
It exists because two grad students, both in the middle of a paper, asked for exactly this within a day of each other. People taking notes next to a laptop are mostly taking notes about a document.
How the connection works
The two apps talk over your own network, with no account and no server in between. On the Mac the companion has no window and no menu bar icon; it sits in the notch and wakes up when a page moves.
This is Desktop mode, and it stays off until you turn it on in Settings in Pen Friend. Only then does the iPad ask for Local Network and Photos access. If you said no to either by accident, turn them back on in the iPad's Settings, under Apps, Pen Friend.
What it is not
Sidecar is free, built in and much better at turning the iPad into a second display or a drawing tablet. That is a different job. Pen Friend is a notebook whose pages move between the two machines, and the round trip is the part it is built for.
What you need
Pen Friend runs on iPadOS 18 or later and the Mac companion on macOS 15 or later, and you need an Apple Pencil. Both apps are free, with no account and no subscription, and your notes back up to your own iCloud.
