Four lessons from building a handwriting notes app for iPad

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The developer of GraphNotes, a handwriting notes app for iPad, iPhone and Mac, shares technical lessons from the build. The app keeps original ink as the note, indexes handwriting for search without replacing strokes, and links notes to permanent IDs. Detecting new strokes is more reliable by diffing PencilKit stroke path creation dates than by comparing stroke counts, which undo, redo and the eraser break. Handwriting recognition via iOS 27's PKStrokeRecognizer needs a fresh instance per drawing, careful handling of nil results, and Sendable-safe mapping of search results under Swift 6. The developer also notes that CKSyncEngine delivers fetched change pages in a way that makes failure recovery tricky, so state must be persisted alongside the changes.

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