How Dotted Mind started

For as long as I can remember, pen and paper have been my favorite way to capture ideas, thoughts and feelings.

About ten years ago, the Bullet Journal method helped me replace loose paper notes with hardcover notebooks. The simplicity and intimacy of the next empty page, and having all my notes in one living notebook, had a huge impact on my life.

Many notebooks later, the limitations became hard to ignore. Pages ran out fast, finding older notes was cumbersome, and I couldn’t carry my notebook everywhere.

Reluctantly, I gave digital journaling a chance. The apps were powerful, and the advantages were obvious. But none of them captured the simplicity, calm and feeling of writing in a real hardcover notebook.

So I decided to build my own.

After countless iterations and discarded designs, I’m excited to finally share my digital interpretation of a hardcover notebook with the world.

What Dotted Mind is

Dotted Mind turns your iPad and Apple Pencil into a calm notebook for your loose thoughts, ideas and sketches.

The note app market is crowded with powerful document editors. Dotted Mind goes the other way. I want the iPad and Apple Pencil to feel like one object rather than software: a real thinking space for people who think with a pen.

• The next empty page is one gesture away. No file pickers, no setup. Open the notebook and write, like flipping to a fresh page.
• Books and chapters instead of files and folders. Your notes live in notebooks you leaf through, not a document tree you manage.
• A pencil case, not a toolbar. Real tools with real places, always at hand.
• Calm by default. The interface stays out of the way until you ask for it, so the app disappears and the notebook remains.

The pencil case is a good example of what “feels physical” means in practice. With a paper notebook you always know what’s in your hand; nobody checks a toolbar before writing. Most note apps break that certainty. The active tool hides among small icons somewhere at the edge of the screen, and you glance around before every mark. Dotted Mind shows the selected tool at a glance, so the moment the Pencil touches the page you already know exactly what mark it will leave.

And because this is a notebook, not a drawing app, the tools are set up for grabbing one specific tool for one specific purpose: a pen for writing, a pencil for sketching ideas, a red pencil for marking things in your own writing, and colored markers where each color means something personal to you. Every tool keeps its position, like the pencil kit you’d carry with a physical notebook. Four custom cases sit in direct access.

How I build it

Dotted Mind is a native iPadOS app: Swift, SwiftUI and PencilKit, with Core Data and iCloud for your notes, and RevenueCat handling the subscription.

Some background on me: I studied media computer science, coded apps for over a decade, and scaled one from zero to 50k active users as part of a great team at a startup. The first prototypes of Dotted Mind were hand-written too. The release version was not. Since early 2026 I work voice-first, driving coding agents through tickets instead of typing code myself, and I read every line before it ships.

Making that workflow produce production quality took real process and custom tooling. Every change goes through a ticket, a branch and a reviewed pull request, even though I’m the only developer. Agents render any SwiftUI view straight to an image, so layout can be judged in seconds without booting a simulator. A lessons-learned log, 429 entries and counting, has to be checked before debugging and extended after every fix, so a solved problem stays solved instead of being re-debugged three weeks later.

The rule I never break: nothing merges until I’ve tested it on the actual iPad, with the actual Apple Pencil in hand. An app like this lives or dies on its micro-interactions, and a green build tells you nothing about how a page turn feels. A custom menu bar app I built lets me build and run on my test devices without ever opening Xcode, so this check is cheap enough to run on every single change.

The payoff of all this: the agents handle the typing, and my time goes where the value is, iterating on feel far more times than I could ever have afforded by hand.

The hard parts

Performance on older devices is the ongoing fight. The iOS 17 floor means many older iPads get to become a digital notebook, but it also means wrestling SwiftUI APIs that weren’t quite final back then. I back-port as much of the experience I design for newer devices as those machines can carry, and I think it’s worth the effort.

The harder challenge is a personal one. Tricky technical problems don’t scare me; eventually I find a suitable solution. But this is my first solo release, and marketing is genuinely new to me. Most of my time right now goes into learning how to communicate the vision for this app to the people who might love it.

What I learned

Compliance can’t wait until the end. Privacy policy, legal texts, store metadata: preparing these earlier would have saved me weeks at the finish line.

Collect interest from day one. My next project will have a wishlist page up long before launch, instead of me collecting emails in my phone’s notes app.

And the big one: AI really does change what a single person can ship, but only wrapped in the discipline of real engineering process. The process is where the quality comes from.

Where it goes from here

Dotted Mind was in open beta from June 2026, and now it’s on the App Store. Getting a passion project from “my own itch” to a polished app that strangers use daily is the thing I’m proudest of.

Feedback from the beta testers decided the final adjustments before I pressed the button, and it keeps reshaping the roadmap after launch. Beyond that, the roadmap is long: sync across iPhone and Mac, and more of what makes a notebook feel alive under your pen.

You can try it today. Download it on the App Store, and your feedback directly shapes what comes next.

This is just the beginning :)