Drop your notes on the charm. It quizzes you back.
For students · nothing to switch on · never leaves your Mac
Revising? Drag your lecture PDF onto the charm hanging under your menu bar. It lands in the little basket, Charmling reads it on your Mac, and asks you questions about it — one at a time, answers hidden until you pick.
Three steps, and no settings
- Drag a file onto the charm. A PDF, a slide deck, a photo of a page — from Finder, your desktop, or straight out of an email. It drops into the basket.
- Ask for the quiz. Hold ⌘ and click the charm, then press Quiz Me. Or Control-click the charm and pick 📚 Quiz Me on These Files.
- Answer. Four options, one question at a time. Press 1–4 or click. It marks you straight away, says why, and offers another go at the ones you missed.
There is no quiz mode to turn on. This one never looks at your screen, so it needs no Screen Recording permission and no setting enabled. It reads only the files you hand it, and only while you are handing them over.
What it can read
PDFs up to 40 pages a file. Word documents (.docx and old .doc),
OpenDocument, RTF and saved web pages. PowerPoint decks, Excel workbooks, EPUB books. Plain text,
Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON, XML, subtitle files and the rest of that family. And any image —
PNG, JPEG, HEIC, a screenshot, a phone photo of a page.
A PDF with a real text layer is read directly; a scan, a photo or an image-only page goes through Apple's Vision engine on your Mac instead. Word, OpenDocument, RTF and HTML are opened with macOS's own importers — the same ones TextEdit uses — so nothing leaves your Mac to be converted. Drop several files and it quizzes you across all of them at once.
Pages, Keynote and Numbers it cannot read. Those keep their text in a private binary format only Apple's apps can open. Drop one and Charmling tells you so, and tells you to export a PDF or a Word file first.
If it can't read something it says so rather than inventing questions: a file with no text in it, or a document too thin to build a fair quiz from, gets an honest "I couldn't read any text out of that" instead of four made-up questions.
It forgets when you do
The text pulled out of your files lives in memory for exactly as long as the files sit in the basket. Drag them out, deliver them somewhere, or hit Empty Shelf, and it is gone the same instant. None of it is ever written to Day Memory's log or anywhere else on disk — and your original files are never modified, moved or copied.
One footnote, so that claim stays exact. PowerPoint, Excel and EPUB files are ZIP archives, so reading one means unpacking it first. That happens in the system's temporary folder under a random name, and the folder is deleted before the read returns — including when the read fails. It is the only thing about this feature that touches the disk at all, it is gone within the second, and the file you dropped is untouched either way.
How the questions are made
On your Mac, by Apple's on-device model, with no network involved at any point. Charmling asks the model for a structured quiz rather than a paragraph, so a question cannot arrive without its answer attached, and the correct option is shuffled into place by the app rather than chosen by the model — which is why it does not mark right answers wrong. Every question has to be answerable from the material you gave it.
Long documents still work. The on-device model can only read so much at once, and that is a hard limit rather than a setting, so a fat lecture packet is sampled across its whole length before the questions are written. You get questions from the end of a document as well as the beginning.
It is still a small model. A quiz is a good study aid and a bad examiner. If a question looks wrong, trust your notes over the charm — and the material it quotes is always something that was genuinely in your file, so you can go and check.
The basket does four other jobs
Once anything is in it, 🧺 Do Something With Them appears in the menu. All of it happens on your Mac, and all of it writes new files beside the originals.
- Zip them together — several files become one archive named after wherever they came from.
- Convert pictures — to JPEG, PNG or HEIC. Anything that isn't a picture is left alone.
- Shrink to fit an email — under 5, 10 or 25 MB. It spends quality before it spends resolution, because a slightly softer photo is far less noticeable than a smaller one.
- Move them somewhere — pick a folder and they go. The one action that moves your originals.
How the shrinking and zipping actually work, in the guide →
Two other ways it can quiz you
These need more switched on, and they answer different questions.
| Which one | Tests you on | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Quiz Me on your files | What you dropped in the basket | Nothing switched on |
| Quiz Me (your day) | What you read on screen today | Day Memory on |
| ⚡ Sprint Quiz | What you studied in one focus session | Sprint Quiz on |
All three need Apple Intelligence — an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 26 with it switched on. The charm, the basket and everything else run on macOS 13 and up without it.
Get Charmling — seven days free
No card, no account. $14.99 once after that, and every update is included.