PageWright

Why I made it

What it does

• Pen, pencil, highlighter and eraser on PencilKit, with exact stroke widths, lasso move, resize and rotate, shape snapping and a ruler.
• Thirteen shapes you pick and then drag to draw, text boxes and images on the page, and lecture audio recorded alongside the ink.
• Page setup, covers and templates, including vocabulary, handwriting practice, essay plan and assignment planner pages.
• Lined and grid canvases that grow down and right, a horizontal page arrangement, and a sidebar with thumbnails and a heading outline.
• Handwriting converted to text or copied as text, where the device supports the language. Library search covers handwriting, typed text and PDF text.
• Annotate imported PDFs; export a PDF, PNG or notebook file.
• Folders, tags, favourites, trash and automatic backups to a folder you choose, restored as a new notebook.
• Optional iCloud sync between your own devices, and a History panel to restore earlier states of a page.
• Works offline. Apple Pencil is optional: you can draw with a finger. A feedback report is sent only when you send one.

Under the hood

• Every edit goes into an append-only operation log before it counts as done, so undo, redo and history are built to survive crashes and relaunches. Builds are checked with a repeated kill-and-recover crash suite (10 to 50 runs, depending on the gate); it simulates the app being killed, not a power cut.
• Notebooks are documented packages that other tools can read. Any change to the format needs a version bump and a migration.
• Sync replays that operation log over CloudKit, with seed snapshots so a new device restores its notebooks and a direct local-network channel for faster live sync. It is not a historical backup; the app keeps its own.
• In a simulator benchmark on a synthetic 200-page notebook, a stroke became durable in about 8 ms (median, Debug build; not yet measured on an iPad).
• Known limits: very large drawings can make PencilKit’s recognition run warm, a restored copy keeps a recording’s audio but loses its tap-ink-to-hear links, and study-mode flashcards have a scheduler but no screen yet. Needs iPadOS 27 or later.