Napkin is a tiny macOS whiteboard for quick thinking, sketching, and ink-first notes. It gives you a large canvas, simple pen colors, an eraser, undo/redo, clear with undo, image export, Apple Sidecar support, and pen-tablet-friendly omnidirectional scrolling.
Download the latest Napkin.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag Napkin.app into Applications.
Local builds are ad-hoc signed. The first time you open one, macOS may block it because it cannot verify the developer. If that happens:
- Open
System Settings. - Go to
Privacy & Security. - Find the message about Napkin being blocked.
- Click
Open Anyway.
You can also right-click Napkin.app, choose Open, then confirm you want to open it.
- Large canvas that starts in the middle so you can pan in every direction.
- Dark mode that swaps the canvas and primary pen rendering without changing stroke data.
- Persistent default mode preference in Settings.
- Black, blue, red, and green pens.
- Eraser with cursor preview.
- Undo and redo, including undoing Clear.
- Export the visible canvas or the full drawn area as PNG.
- Works with Apple Sidecar for sketching from an iPad.
- Hold right click or middle click and hover away from the starting point to continuously scroll.
Requirements:
- macOS 13 or newer
- Swift 6 or newer
- Xcode command line tools
Run the app directly:
swift run NapkinBuild a .app bundle:
scripts/build-app.sh
open .build/Napkin.appBuild a release .dmg:
scripts/package-dmg.sh
open .build/Napkin.dmgBuild a distributable, notarized release .dmg:
CODESIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)" \
NOTARYTOOL_PROFILE="napkin-notary" \
scripts/package-dmg.shYou can also provide notarization credentials directly with APPLE_ID, APPLE_TEAM_ID, and APPLE_APP_PASSWORD.
Napkin is early software. It is intentionally small, local-only, and focused on the drawing loop.
The source code is available at github.com/alex-k03/napkin.
Created by Alexander Kharchenko.
Napkin is open source software released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.