OwlLuna
GitHub
For iPad and Apple PencilFree · MIT License

Handwritten notes for iPad. Free, for good.

No subscription, no ads, no account and no tracking. OwlLuna is open source, and your notes stay on your iPad, and in your own iCloud if you turn sync on.

Join the beta on TestFlightSource on GitHub
NotesP. 12
STUDY
Notebook
  • Price

    Free

    No subscription, no one-time fee, nothing to unlock.

  • Code

    Open source

    Released under the MIT License. The code is on GitHub.

  • Your notes

    Private

    No accounts, no analytics, no ads. Handwriting and speech are read on the iPad.

  • Made with

    Apple frameworks only

    SwiftUI, PencilKit, PDFKit, Vision and SwiftData. No third-party code.

Writing

Pick up a pen and write.

Handwriting with Apple Pencil runs on PencilKit, with palm rejection, pressure and tilt. The tools around the page are the app’s own.

The tool tray

Up to eight pens, set up once.

One slim board at the foot of the page holds your pens, an eraser and a lasso. Each pen keeps its own kind, colour, width and opacity.

Tap a pen to write with it and tap it again to change it. The empty label at the end adds another.

Try the tray. Each pen writes the page again in its own ink.

Kind
Pen
Colour
Black
Width
Medium
Opacity
100%

Draw and hold

Rest the pen and the shape straightens.

Draw a line, a circle, an ellipse, a rectangle, a triangle or any figure with straight sides, and rest the pen a moment before lifting. A line with a hook at its end becomes an arrow.

Undo gives your own stroke back, and Settings › Apple Pencil turns it off.

Or keep Shapes in the tray: tie it on from Customise Tools, then pick a line, an arrow, a circle, a rectangle or a triangle on the strip over the tray and drag it out on the page.

Pick a shape, then Undo.

Shape
Circle
Stroke
As drawn

Also on the page

Type from ink, small writing and boards with no edges.

You choose what draws: Apple Pencil only, a finger as well, or whatever the system setting says. Focus mode puts the toolbar away and leaves the page and your tools.

Luna
Writing, continued
Handwriting to text
Select ink and choose Turn into Text. It is read on the device, and you can correct the words, copy them or set them on the page in the handwriting’s place.
Zoom window
A magnified strip along the bottom for writing small and neat. It moves along the line as you write.
Zoom
Pinch to zoom up to 5×, with crisp ink and backgrounds at every level.
Whiteboards
A page with no edges, for brainstorming and diagrams. Pinch out to see a whole wall of it.
Pencil gestures
Scribble back and forth over ink to erase it, or draw a loop round ink and hold still to select it.

Notebooks and paper

Fourteen kinds of paper, bound in cloth.

Choose the paper a page needs, give the notebook a cover, and shelve it where you will find it again.

This weekTry it: tap a cover for its favourite ribbon
  • Field NotesMar 2026
    Cloth
  • Life Drawing
    Print
  • CelloSep 2026
    Cloth
  • First page
  • PlannerJan 2026
    Cloth
  • RecipesKitchen
    Cloth

  • Three kinds of cover

    Cloth, Print with the look of riso, or the notebook’s own first page. A cover can be changed at any time.

  • Starters for a new notebook

    New Notebook offers Journal, Whiteboard, Lecture, Sketchbook, Planner, Music and Plain, and Shuffle deals a fresh cover.

  • Favourites and sorting

    Touch and hold a notebook and choose Favourite to keep it close to hand, and sort the shelf by last opened, modified, created or title.

A drawer of paper

The paper drawer shows real miniatures. Add a page with any paper, or change the paper and colour of a page in place and undo it if you think better of it.

Templates
Fourteen, in four families: writing, grids, planning and creative.
Colours
Nine, from white to chalkboard, where the ink writes chalk-white.
Page sizes
US Letter, A4, A5 and widescreen.
Paper drawerWhite

Colour

Writing

  • Blank
  • Narrow ruled
  • Wide ruled
  • Penmanship
  • Checklist

Grids

  • Grid
  • Engineering
  • Dotted
  • Isometric

Planning

  • Cornell
  • Day planner
  • Week planner

Creative

  • Music staff
  • Storyboard

Folders, tags and smart shelves

Folders
Each has a spine colour, and folders go inside folders. Drag notebooks onto them in the sidebar, reorder them, and fold a folder’s own folders away.
Tags
Tag a notebook or a single page and the tag gets a shelf in the sidebar, with the notebooks that carry it and the tagged pages under them.
Smart shelves
A saved filter: everything tagged with any, or all, of the tags you choose.

OwlLuna

  • All notebooks27
  • Favourites4

Shelves

    • Chemistry5
    • Statistics4
  • Sketches6
  • House3

Smart shelves

  • Exam weekexam or revision

Tags

  • exam
  • revision
  • lab
  • ideas
  • to scan

A daily journal

Today’s page is printed with the date, and On this day brings back the page from a month or a year ago.

Locked notebooks

A locked notebook asks for Face ID, Touch ID or the iPad’s passcode every time it is opened, and what is written in it is left out of search.

Worth knowingA lock keeps a notebook closed in the app. It does not encrypt its files.

Studying

Cover the answer, then see if you knew it.

Hide part of a page under study tape, make flashcards from it, and each card comes back later the better you knew it.

AstronomyP. 12
Tap a strip to lift it. Tap again to put it back.

Study tape

Tape over the answer

Study tape is a strip of washi tape in four colours. It covers what is under it, ink included. Tap it to lift it and tap again to put it back, with a finger or Apple Pencil.

Lifting is for looking and is never saved, so every strip is back in place the next time you open the notebook.

  • mustard
  • rose
  • sage
  • sky
Card 1 of 3From study tape

Flashcards

Every notebook can hold a deck

Making a card
Study tape
The question is that part of the page with the tape on. The answer is the same part with the tape lifted.
Handwriting
Select it and it is clipped onto a card as it looks on its paper.
Your own
Or write a card yourself.

After turning a card over you say Again, Good or Easy, and it comes back later the better you knew it: tomorrow, then in three days, then in about a week, and so on up to a year. A card you forgot comes round again in the same sitting.

What a study guide gives you

Key Points

  1. The main points of a page, a whole notebook or a recording’s transcript.
  2. Practice questions with their answers, which you can save as flashcards.
  3. A summary you can add to the page as a text box.

Written on the iPad itself, by Apple Intelligence.

Practice question
And on an iPad without Apple Intelligence?The sheet says so and nothing else happens.

Study guide

The main points, written on the iPad

A study guide is the main points of what you wrote, and practice questions to go with them. Apple Intelligence writes it on the iPad itself, so it needs iPadOS 26 or later and an iPad with Apple Intelligence turned on.

Audio

Play the lecture back and watch your notes arrive.

Record lectures or meetings alongside a notebook, and play them back later.

AstronomyP. 11
0:060:16
TranscriptMade on the device

Tap a line to hear it

Tap a line of ink to jump the sound to the moment it was written.

Replay with your ink

What you wrote during a recording is faint until the sound reaches the moment you wrote it, and the page turns to follow the writing.

Tap ink to jump

Tapping ink jumps the sound to when it was written. In a transcript, tap a line to hear it with the ink you wrote as it was said.

Transcribed on the device

Ask for a transcript and the recording is written down on the iPad, never on a server. If the iPad can’t transcribe a language on the device, the app says so and sends nothing.

Everything else

And the rest

PDFs and scans, search, presenting, a writing history, widgets, backup and languages. A few lines on each.

Search

Search looks through titles, handwriting, typed text, PDF text, the print on scans and what was said in transcribed recordings. Handwriting is read on the iPad, and each result opens at the matching page.

Find in a notebook marks every place the words appear and steps from one to the next. Spotlight finds notebooks from the Home Screen by their title or the words in them, unless you turn it off in Settings › Search.

⌘F
Find in a notebook
⌘G
The next match
tides

Field Notes · Page 4

Spring tides come at full and new moon

Read from handwriting, on the iPad.

PDFs and scans

Import

Open a PDF as a notebook of its own, or insert it into one you have, and write on it.

Select text

Drag across a PDF’s own text to copy it, or highlight it in yellow, green, pink or blue.

Scan

The camera finds the paper, straightens and crops it, and each sheet becomes a page you can write on.

Export

A notebook as a PDF, pages as PNG images, or one page as a time-lapse video of it being written.

  • PDF
  • PNG
  • Video
Second screen

Presenting

Present shows one whole page at a time. The Pencil becomes a laser pointer with a fading tail, in red or green, and nothing it draws is saved.

Attach a second screen and the page and the laser go there, while the controls and your presenter notes stay on the iPad.

The audience only ever sees the page.

This weekMTWTFSS

Writing history

A This-week strip in the library: seven small sheets, inked on the days you wrote. A writing calendar, laid out like a printed diary, opens the exact pages you wrote on any day.

The history is a small file on your iPad that is never synced, and Settings › Writing History turns it off or clears it.

No streaks, badges or reminders.

Home ScreenThursday12MarchWrittenQuick Note

Widgets and shortcuts

Widgets
Continue Writing, This Week, Today’s Page and Quick Note on the Home Screen, with Lock Screen versions.
Control Center
Buttons for Quick Note and Today’s Page.
Shortcuts and Siri
Open today’s journal page, start a quick note, continue writing, or open a notebook by name.
Backup and sync

Backup

Settings › Backup puts the whole library into one file, to restore on this or another iPad. Restoring adds what is missing and never replaces a notebook: one that differs from the backup comes back beside yours as a copy.

It carries your flashcards, smart shelves and writing history with it.

iCloud sync

Sync between your iPads asks before it starts, and Settings › iCloud has the switch. Each notebook is copied whole, and one changed on two devices keeps both versions.

It has been tested on real iCloud, between iPads on one Apple Account. As with any sync, a backup first is a good habit.

Languages

  • English
  • Español
  • Français
  • Deutsch

English, Spanish, French and German, including the widgets, the Siri phrases and the permission prompts. The translations have not been reviewed by native speakers yet, and corrections are welcome.

Requirements

iPad
iPadOS 18 or later
Mac
Apple silicon Macs, as an iPad app

Privacy

What OwlLuna knows about you: nothing.

There is no account to make and no server of mine behind the app. Your notebooks are files on your iPad, and iCloud sync, which asks before it starts, keeps a copy in your own iCloud.

Read the Privacy Policy
What is collected
Accounts
None. There is nothing to sign in to.
Analytics
None, and no crash reporter either.
Ads and trackers
None.
Third-party code
None. Apple’s frameworks only.
Where the reading happens
Handwriting and scans
Read on the iPad.
Recordings
Transcribed on the iPad, or not at all.
Study guides
Written by Apple Intelligence on the iPad.
Your notebooks
On your iPad, and in your own iCloud if sync is on.

Built by Owais Khan

A note from the developer

When I was a student, there were only a handful of really good apps for taking notes by hand on an iPad, Goodnotes and Notability among them. Every one of them wanted money: a subscription, or a one-time fee if you were lucky. I used to wonder whether a free app could ever be as good as the paid ones.

Then I graduated, and started working, and the question came with me. It sat in the back of my head like a to-do I never ticked.

Because look at the sums. First you buy the iPad. Then you buy the Pencil, which is sold separately. And then, once you own both, an app asks for a monthly fee before you may write on the glass you have already paid for. Paper has its faults, but it has never once sent me a renewal notice.

So I built the app myself, from scratch. The idea was simple enough to fit on an index card:

 
  1. Free. No subscription, no one-time fee, nothing to unlock.
  2. Open source. Every line is on GitHub, so you don’t have to take my word for it.
  3. No data collection. Your notes are yours. I never see them, and frankly I have enough of my own handwriting to decipher.

“Simple” turned out to take a while. But here it is: the app I was looking for back then. I hope it is the one you were looking for too.

What a notebook costs
iPad
Bought.
Apple Pencil
Bought. Charged, too.
A notes app
A subscription. Or a one-time fee, if you were lucky.
OwlLuna
Nothing.

Prototypes

The drafts, tipped out on the desk.

Screenshots saved while the app was being finished: first tries, options side by side, and a few dead ends.

See them in order

Drag them about with a mouse, or select one for a closer look.Tap one for a closer look.

Open source

Read the code, or help write it.

OwlLuna is released under the MIT License, and the whole project is on GitHub. Clone it, build it yourself, and see what it does with your notes.

The repository on GitHubMIT License

Found a problem, or missing a feature?

Bug reports and feature requests go in GitHub Issues. To send a change of your own, read the contributing guide first: for anything larger than a small fix, it asks for an issue before the code.

Contributing guideOpen an issue