Microsoft’s pen-first notetaking app Journal graduates from a Garage project into a fully supported app

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge

The company announced Tuesday that it had elevated its Garage project Journal, a notetaking app for styluses and pens, into a full-fledged product called Microsoft Journal.

The app offers a freeform personal note taking experience that lets you take notes and reason through ink. The app allows you to write and draw like many other note taking apps, but it also supports gestures such as scratching out words to erase them and circling words to select them. 59 percent of all page types in Journal were PDF, according to a pie chart in a post, and you can use the app to mark up PDFs.

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has a brand called Garage for its more experimental products. Oz Solomon, principal engineering manager of the Journal team, said in the post that the company has plans to address the most common requests.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Journal, you can watch this video from when the app was first announced. You can get the app for free from the Microsoft Store. It is compatible with both Windows 10 and Windows 11.