Search handwritten notes on iPad by meaning
Handwriting is easy to make and hard to find again. A stack of paper notebooks has no search box, and most iPad notebooks only match the letters they managed to read. Pen Friend works the other way round: you write what you half remember, in your own hand, and it finds the page by what it was about.
Write the question, by hand
Open search and write your question with the Apple Pencil, the same way you write on the page. You do not need the exact words you used at the time. Write "my recent issues" and it brings back the pages where you were working through problems, even if that phrase appears on none of them.
Behind it, every page gets read. Pen Friend keeps the words it reads off your ink, plus a short summary and keywords for each page, and searches all of that together. So a page is found by what it was about, not by what you named it or which folder it ended up in.
Across every worklog at once
Pages gather into worklogs, and worklogs into folders, and search covers all of them in one go. A stack of notebooks you could never search becomes one you can.
It also writes a short briefing for each worklog, so you can see what is inside without opening it, and it proposes which folder a worklog belongs in. You see every move before it happens and approve it in one tap. Nothing is filed behind your back.
What it needs, and what it sends
Search by meaning is one of three features written by Google's Gemini model, with the pen friend and the briefings. They stay off until you agree to them, and the rest of the notebook works without them.
When it is on, the text Pen Friend has already written about your worklogs, the titles, labels, keywords and short summaries, is sent together with the words of your search. There is no account, so nothing is tied to your name or your Apple ID. Turning it off again is one switch in Settings, under Pen friend and briefings.
Who it suits
Anyone with a pile of handwritten notes they can no longer find their way through: engineers keeping a worklog, students working problems by hand, people writing in meetings next to a laptop. If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, Pen Friend is free on the App Store, with no account, no subscription and no in-app purchase. Your notes live on your iPad and back up to your own iCloud.
