DIARY · 2026-08-25 · EveryJot
EveryJot lands on iPad
Roberto Bonfa' · 2026-08-25
EveryJot was born on 12 August and reached the App Store on the 21st. Nine days later it became something else: it also runs on iPad, and not as a blown-up phone app.
Version 2.0.0 is with Apple for review as I write this.
What changes on iPad
- Three columns: notebooks on the left, the list of notes in the middle, the open note on the right. Nothing changes on iPhone, and that is the first thing I checked.
- Handwriting with the Apple Pencil, which becomes an attachment to the note just like a photo. A Pencil is not required: a finger works too.
- Drag and drop: a file from another app lands inside a note, and a note goes out to another app.
- Twenty-six keyboard shortcuts for anyone keeping the iPad on a physical keyboard, plus pointer and trackpad behaving the way you would expect.
- Search inside the open note, which did not exist anywhere before.
One app, not two
Worth settling right away: no second app was born. Same name, same listing, same identifier, same price, which is free. Anyone who already has EveryJot on their iPhone finds it on their iPad without doing anything and without paying anything.
Two separate apps would have meant two listings to maintain, two reviews every time, and above all two copies of the same code that stop being identical after a month. Apple has a rule against duplicates. Here there is a single binary that learns to lay itself out in two ways.
The lesson I am keeping
I lost two days to a defect that was not mine. On the iPad the buttons at the top of a note almost never responded: I made five guesses, all wrong, and each round cost a build. The cause was a system update waiting to be installed. Once installed, the defect was gone. For crying out loud! 🤬
The signal saying "look outside the code" was there from the first minute: on the simulator, same version and same screen size, nothing ever happened. It took me two days to listen to it.
Three real fixes came out of that chase anyway. Not a draw, but something.