Launching today
Pennen
One quiet handwritten page a day. No feed, no AI.
74 followers
One quiet handwritten page a day. No feed, no AI.
74 followers
Pennen is a calm, private, handwriting-first daily journal for iPad and Apple Pencil. One dated page per day, in real ink: past pages seal and become read-only, emoji stickers peel and press on, and the streak forgives — a one-line night still counts. Your pages live only on your iPad and in your own iCloud: no accounts, no ads, no analytics, no AI reading a word. Priced like a notebook — yearly with a 7-day free trial, or a one-time lifetime that costs less than a Moleskine.
Love that past pages actually seal read-only, such a quiet way to make the journal feel real and uncheatable without any gamification pressure.
@egemensafe95621 Thank you, and "uncheatable without gamification" is a sharper way to put it than I've managed myself. Most habit apps get compliance through pressure, streak counts, red badges, guilt notifications, and none of that actually requires the underlying data to be honest. You can lie your way through a badge just fine.
Sealing does the opposite on purpose. There's no reward for it and no punishment for skipping it, it's just that once the day is gone, what you wrote that day is what happened. Nothing to perform for, so nothing to game.
this is a nice contrast to basically everything else on here today. "the streak forgives, a one-line night still counts" is such a small detail but it's the difference between a habit tool and a guilt machine. every other journaling app i've tried eventually adds some AI summary feature nobody asked for, so keeping that out on purpose is the actual selling point, not a missing feature. only question is what happens if you lose the iPad, is there any backup path beyond iCloud or is that a deliberate no as well
Any plans to bring this to iPhone?
@gauravgoyal Not currently, it's a deliberate choice rather than something I haven't gotten to. Pennen is built entirely around real handwriting, not typing or a cramped finger-drawn page. iPad is what actually makes the app possible.
the "past pages seal and become read-only" detail is what sells this for me. it makes the journal feel like real ink instead of an editable text box you'll fidget with forever. and "the streak forgives, a one-line night still counts" is the opposite of every guilt-trip habit app i've quit. feels made by someone who actually journals. congrats on the launch.
@alex_watson2110 Thank you, genuinely. The one-line-night rule came straight from my own worst habit-app experience, I quit every streak app the moment it shamed me for missing a day, so I built the opposite on purpose. A single line at 11pm counts exactly the same as a full page, because on paper it always did.
The sealing was the harder one to actually hold the line on, mostly resisting the urge to add an edit exception for myself. Comments like yours are exactly why I didn't.
I do like the idea of a non-AI app that is clean and simple. Your aesthetic is calming and nice too.
You do claim that the one-time lifetime costs less than a Moleskine but that's not true. A new moleskin is $26: https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/notebooks/the-original-notebook/classic-notebook-sapphire-blue-8051272893601.html and lifetime access for your app is $40 per the bottom of your app store page: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pennen-handwritten-journal/id6781577517
@mjohnson42 You're right, and thanks for actually checking instead of letting it slide. Lifetime is $39.99, a classic Moleskine runs $26, so "less than a Moleskine" is just wrong as I've written it, not a rounding difference.
What I think I actually meant was something closer to "about the price of one good notebook," but that's not what I said, and what I said is checkable and false. I'm going to go fix that line in the coming releases instead of leaving it up. Appreciate you calling it out directly.
Love this. I've journaled on paper and I've journaled on the notes app. This sounds like a perfect medium.
@cairacshields Thank you, that's exactly the gap I built this for. Paper gets the feeling right and a notes app gets the durability right, and neither one gives you both at once. Would love to hear what you think once you've actually written a few real pages in it, the honest test is always after the first week, not the first look.