Turning Apple Pencil Into a Reed Pen: How I Built and Shipped Qalaris
Building Qalaris forced me to simulate a flat-cut calligraphy nib with round hardware, teach a multimodal model to critique form instead of simply generate it, and redesign my AI credit system after local storage failed.
A reed pen does not behave like a digital brush.
Its flat-cut nib creates broad or thin marks depending on the direction of movement and the angle at which the writer holds it. Its ink supply is finite. A confident stroke can begin in deep black and weaken as the reservoir empties. The tool is not separate from the letter; its physical constraints help create the form.
Apple Pencil, meanwhile, has a round tip.
That mismatch became the central engineering problem behind Qalaris, the iPad app I built and shipped for RevenueCat Shipaton 2026. Qalaris combines an Apple Pencil-driven reed pen simulation, guided Arabic calligraphy lessons, multimodal AI review, and a credit system built with...
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