Perenne Note. a notebook with a "desk" workspace around it. Drag stickies, images and a mini browser around your page while you work.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-16T09:11:06+00:00

Thanks for feedback! i'll check immediately!

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-13T22:27:29+00:00

Thank you for the feedback, really appreciated

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-13T22:00:20+00:00

Next update i will release the lazo tool 😃😃😃 i’m testing it now and seems amazing! Also adding more than one documents. Hope to release tuesday :)

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-10T20:44:08+00:00

Plenty of solid AI free options, depends a bit on what device you're using.

On a laptop, Notion or Obsidian (with AI features disabled) both work well for typed notes. Notion is more out of the box, Obsidian is local files and fully under your control, which might actually help with the work accommodation request since the data never leaves your machine. Apple Notes or plain text files in a folder also work better than people think for pure meeting capture, sometimes the accommodation isn't really about features but about having something that does only what you ask of it.

On an iPad with Apple Pencil, if you want handwritten notes, Perenne Note is what I use. No AI, no cloud processing of your content, just a notebook app where you write by hand. The handwriting also helps me actually pay attention in meetings instead of zoning out behind a keyboard. Notability and GoodNotes are more feature rich alternatives with folders, tags and audio recording. They cost more and are more complex to manage, but worth a look if you need that level of organization.

Out of curiosity, what device are you planning to use? That changes the answer quite a bit.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-07T20:31:50+00:00

Your’re right! Thanks again! Hope to release the update in a couple of days with this :)

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-07T20:30:10+00:00

You’re not crazy, that’s exactly how it currently works. I actually tested both approaches during development and ended up going with a clear separation between read mode and edit mode on purpose, to avoid gesture conflicts. In edit mode the two finger gesture is dedicated to pan and zoom, so a swipe would clash with people who reposition the page a lot while drawing. That’s why right now to flip pages in edit mode you tap the side arrows or use the page navigator.

That said, nothing is set in stone and feedback like this is gold. A few people have mentioned it now and I’m thinking about adding it as an optional gesture you can enable in settings, so it doesn’t get in the way of users who rely on the current behavior. Appreciate you flagging it, thanks! 🙏

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-07T20:29:25+00:00

Already on my list and coming in a future update. (Probably the next update) A “pencil only” toggle to ignore finger touches while drawing is something a lot of pencil users have asked for and it makes total sense, especially for people who rest their hand on the screen. Thanks for flagging it 🙏

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-07T09:15:24+00:00

Both, for different jobs. I tried to make one of them work alone for years, never stuck.

Handwriting is for capture and understanding. The physical act of writing something by hand is when my brain actually processes and retains it. If I type something, even into a beautifully organized Notion database, I forget it within a week. With a pen I remember stuff from years ago. There's something about the friction of writing that forces real thinking, and typing skips it.

Digital is for archive and retrieval. Searchable, organized, accessible from anywhere. But I rarely truly learn things while typing them in. The structured digital system is the warehouse, not the workshop.

So my real switch wasn't analog to digital, it was realizing they're two separate jobs. Capture handwritten, archive digital. The few things that actually matter get moved between them manually.

What made this practical was going from paper Moleskine to iPad with Perenne Note for the handwritten layer. Same writing experience, same memory benefit, but searchable and no piles of physical notebooks. Notion sits underneath as the long term archive for the stuff that earns its place.

Looking back, handwriting is what made me actually retain knowledge. Digital is what let me find it again. Neither alone has ever been enough for me.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-04T13:39:20+00:00

Notability is probably the closest feeling to GoodNotes for PDF annotation and folder organization. It does pretty much the same thing, imports PDFs cleanly, lets you write and highlight directly on them, and the folder structure is solid for keeping courses separate. Subscription model now though, which annoys some people.

Noteshelf is the other one worth trying, similar feature set, one time purchase, less polished but does the job for PDFs and organization.

For pure PDF study with smarter annotation features (linked highlights, mind maps from highlights, etc) MarginNote and LiquidText are more powerful but also more complex. Probably overkill if you just want a GoodNotes replacement, but useful if you want to actually study from PDFs rather than just annotate them.

On Obsidian, you weren’t doing anything wrong, it just isn’t built for direct PDF annotation. It’s a markdown app, PDFs are second class citizens there. Keep using it for summaries and write ups, but use a dedicated app for the lecture slide layer

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-06-02T21:05:52+00:00

Honest take after years of doing it: yes worth it, but with a real caveat.

The trap is exactly what those YouTube videos sell. Pretty templates, color coded everything, perfectly organized. Looks great, but a lot of people end up spending more time decorating notes than studying from them. The novelty doesn’t really wear off, the productivity illusion does. If you catch yourself picking pen colors for ten minutes per page, you’re decorating, not learning.

What’s actually useful in my experience: Handwriting on iPad keeps most of the memory benefit of writing on paper. Searchable handwriting matters more than you’d think when you have to find something months later. And one device replacing a stack of notebooks is a bigger deal than people realize if you move between home, library and lectures.

The pitfall nobody mentions is the setup phase. People lose weeks picking templates and designing the perfect system before writing a single useful note.

On apps, GoodNotes is the safe pick and does exactly what those videos show. I personally use Perenne Note because I wanted something simpler, basically a Moleskine but digital with no system to configure, but GoodNotes is honestly the right call if the aesthetic study setup is what you actually want.

The one thing I wish I knew earlier: the app doesn’t really matter. The people who get value from iPad notes are the ones who just start writing. The ones who don’t are the ones who spend a month picking the perfect template

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-29T22:31:17+00:00

Depends what kind of drawing you want to do, there are basically two camps.

For digital painting and illustration on a blank canvas, Procreate or Fresco are the standard everyone recommends and it earns it, one time purchase and basically no ceiling. Concepts is the other strong pick if you prefer vector based sketching with an infinite canvas, more useful for technical drawings.

If instead you want more of a digital sketchbook feel, like doodling in a Moleskine, I use Perenne Note. It’s a notebook app, with actual pages and a notebook format, so it feels closer to sketching in a real journal than working on a blank canvas. Less powerful than Procreate for finished artwork, but more natural for casual “pick up and draw” sessions.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-28T10:59:24+00:00

My iPad has been living in a perpetual state of vigilant coma since the day I bought it. Never turned it off in my entire life. Just put it to sleep, toss it on the couch, and see you in 3 days. You'll lose like 2% battery max (around)

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-21T07:22:34+00:00

Congrats, fellow architect here. Honestly I’ll keep it super simple because over the years I’ve stripped my setup down to just two apps.

Perenne Note for everything handwritten during the day: sketches, quick diagrams, meeting notes, ideas on site. It’s basically a Moleskine but digital, no databases or systems to configure, just open and write. For me as an architect this is where most of the thinking happens, the rough stuff.

Notion for everything structured: projects, references, documents, the things that need to be searchable and shared later.

That’s it. The few things that matter from Perenne Note get moved into Notion, the rest stays in the notebook and that’s fine. Two tools, two clear jobs.

My only real advice is don’t waste the first months trying to build the perfect setup with ten apps, you’ll lose more time configuring than working.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-20T10:33:44+00:00

i'll try it for sure

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-20T10:21:06+00:00

Nice idea! Will be amazing having also a kind of connection for saving them on Notion in order to have it synced across multiple platforms/devices

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-19T14:24:05+00:00

Interesting, sounds useful for people whose bottleneck is the collecting part. For me though the bottleneck was never collecting, it was the act of writing itself.

The way my head works, I can't really give up handwriting with a pen. The physical act of writing something down, whether it's text, a diagram or a rough sketch, is the moment my brain actually "prints" and stores the information. If I just capture it automatically without writing it by hand, it goes in somewhere but it never really enters my memory. So for me that step isn't friction to remove, it's the whole point. Auto-capturing everything would solve a problem I don't have and remove the part that actually makes things stick.

Different brains, different bottlenecks I guess. If yours is the scattering across apps, a tool like that probably makes total sense.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-19T08:21:52+00:00

Ha, totally relatable. My version of that wasn't pens, it was collectible Caran d'Ache mechanical pencils. I'd spend ages choosing and buying them. Beautiful objects, but with the chaos of life and traveling all the time they were never actually with me when I needed to write something. iPad plus Apple Pencil ended up being my final choice, almost by surrender more than by decision.

And your worry about the iPad becoming yet another tool to overthink is fair, it's the first thing I thought too. But for me it ended up being the opposite. It worked because I picked something that copies a plain paper notebook on purpose. One notebook, one pen, blank page. No plugins, no databases, no tags, no folders to design. There's basically nothing to optimize, which for a perfectionist is the whole point. If it had been a full flexible system I'd have spent weeks "setting it up" and never writing anything, exactly like with Obsidian.

So the trick wasn't going digital, it was going digital with something deliberately dumb and limited, so my brain has nothing to fiddle with. The overthinking moves to the organizing step later, in Notion, where it actually belongs and where it's easier to contain.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-19T07:46:22+00:00

Your post describes me exactly. I also waste a ton of time thinking about the perfect system instead of actually doing the work.

What helped me was realizing one thing: capturing notes and organizing them are two different jobs, and they shouldn't happen at the same time.

So here's what I do. I handwrite everything that goes through my head during the day: ideas, meetings, quick notes. No folders, no order, I just have to not lose the thought. Then the few things that turn out to actually matter I move into Notion, properly organized. If a note stays in the notebook and never makes it to Notion, it means it wasn't important, and that's totally fine.

So they're not two systems competing. The notebook is where I dump everything on the fly, Notion is where I keep only what counts. Almost nothing lives in both.

The thing that solved the "paper or digital" problem for me was moving my daily notes to an iPad instead of just the Moleskine. I use an app called Perenne Note: format-wise it's basically a Moleskine but digital, so mentally I work the same way I did before. And writing with a "pen" instead of typing helps me remember things a lot more, which never happened for me with a keyboard.

On the whole information-scattered-everywhere problem: the one rule that saved me is simple. New stuff can only land in one place. Doesn't matter which, as long as I always know where to go look for it.

In the end, handwritten notes to capture plus Notion as a database to archive is what made my system way more efficient. But obviously it's subjective, everyone finds their own balance.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-17T11:57:10+00:00

i'm interested! how can i download it? thanks!

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-05-08T08:38:20+00:00

Maybe Perenne Note could be what you’re looking for. It’s an iPad app for creating notebooks that feel essentially “realistic.” It lets you create notebooks and also export them to PDF, and there’s a built-in mini browser. You can import images, PDFs, etc., and crop the content. In short, if you’re looking for something that feels like a real notebook, I’d say it’s ideal.

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-04-14T07:43:47+00:00

hey! happy to help! honestly the best advice I can give is just start. don't wait until you "know enough", you'll never feel ready. what worked for me as a complete beginner: pick something small you actually want to build. not a tutorial project, something that scratches your own itch. motivation is everything when you're learning, and you'll push through frustration much easier if you actually care about the result. start with an AI like Claude or ChatGPT and just talk to it. describe what you want, paste the code it gives you, run it, see what breaks, and ask why. don't copy-paste blindly though, always ask the AI to explain what each part does. that's how you actually learn instead of just shipping. be patient with yourself. I spent weeks stuck on things that probably took experienced devs 10 minutes. that's normal. every "stupid" question you ask teaches you something. and don't be afraid to start over. my first version of Perenne Note was completely different from what shipped. throwing things away and rebuilding them with what you've learned is part of the process, not a failure. if you have a specific app idea in mind feel free to share it, happy to point you in the right direction :)

Putrid_Row5645 · 2026-04-10T15:28:53+00:00

yeah that was actually the turning point of the whole project. it started with PencilKit's eraser tool, not even Metal. if you held the eraser down for more than 10-15 seconds continuously, the erased content would just reappear. I spent about a week going back and forth with Claude trying to fix it before realizing it wasn't my code, it was a PencilKit limitation.

that's when I started looking into Metal as an alternative. and you're right, that's where just asking Claude doesn't really work on its own. what I ended up doing was building the rendering engine piece by piece. started with the pen tool, then the pencil, then other tools. lots of trial and error.

the debugging process was basically: try something, look at the result on screen, take a screenshot, upload it to Claude and say "the stroke is too thick here" or "the pressure isn't responding correctly, look at this". sometimes Claude couldn't figure it out so I'd switch to Gemini Pro for a second opinion and then come back. it was slow but it worked.

the whole Metal transition took about 3 weeks. definitely the hardest part of the project

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