Bear - Markdown Notes

Bear is a great notes/planning/external brain for iOS. Highly reliable and easily modified to personal preference via tagging and markdown. Would be a five star for me if the handwriting/drawing space worked a little better. As it is, the handwriting insert is proportionally very narrow compared to the available page space and can be even narrower if it is inserted while sidebars are open. As a user who primarily brainstorms with Apple Pencil, this can make my workflow a little awkward.

I am doing a comparison first between Bear and Apple notes. They are pretty much feature comparable the notes has a couple of unique features that Bear does not such as the ability to collapse, headings or subheadings. But my real interest in Bear was looking for an Apple Watch app to create and view notes. Apple’s note app does not have an Apple Watch app, unfortunately. So it is between Bear and Drafts and Cheatsheet. Bear’s notes look the best on the Apple Watch, but is missing features in the Drafts and Cheatsheet apps, for example, the ability to search for a note, add tags or pin a note in the watch apparently, so that is very disappointing. Suggestions or comments from other users are welcome, as well of course as from the developer.

Finally an app that has a solid UI and is just downright beautiful and intuitive. I know Bear has its roots as an IOS app, but I would love to see this grow from an app, to a full fledged productivity platform. As a former Evernote user who left their platform due to a growing lackluster experience, Bear could easily snatch up their market share who’s eager for a fresh experience. Give me a web and windows app, let me create teams and invite external contributors, bonus if there were exposed APIs. I genuinely feel Bear has everything going for it, it just needs to graduate from the app mindset and set its eyes on becoming a true productivity platform.

After auditioning most of the popular note taking apps, Bear is a clear winner! It’s not bloated and glitchy (Evernote), it’s not impossibly complicated (Notion), it’s not chaotic (Obsidion), and it’s not too simple that it lacks important features (Apple Notes). It’s also not outrageously expensive. Bear just does what it should do as a note taking app! It allows me to build a second brain with visual and intuitive organization and capable tech to capture what and how I want to capture. As someone who likes folders, I had to accept their tag system instead…but it works like folders well enough that I’m ok with that. All in all, this is the note taking app for me!

Bear does a great job allowing you to search within individual notes, which is helpful. However, the general search functionality is now disappointing. While it used to locate keywords inside notes during a general search, this feature no longer works. It’s frustrating. Without this, navigating through large amounts of content becomes tedious. Bear is still a solid app, but this regression in search functionality is a big letdown.

God I would give anything to have back the old Bear. She worked flawlessly…. now she’s only a shell of what she once was.

I’m using pro but if it doesn’t improve, I think I’m gonna cancel it…

Bugs have been squashed, direct integrations improved, and still the best for organization, writing, and shortcuts automation.

Um, pretending the original review never happened (along with apologies for the updates)… I am blown away by how nice this app looks, especially on iPad. It’s beautiful, clean-looking, and not stuck in the system font. (It’s also compatible with downloaded fonts, if you like Waiting for the Sunrise while writing a Poor Story.) Dark mode is free, along with a higher-contrast version of the normal light mode. The app itself, however, is not quite flawless. The tag feature is nice but not for everyone. It’s helpful if you previously did not know what the note was to be about, or if you have endless bytes’ worth of notes; but for the more well-organized among us, a file system would be better. Looking for a file system? Notes has one. Too bad it’s ugly. Markdown is one of the app’s key features, but a toolbar is there for us slower typers. On IPad, the latter is the source of a major problem. Add a heading to the note, and you will find you cannot return (use the “return” button). Is this iPad OS’s problem? It could be, but I doubt it. As claimed by the description, Bear indeed has a lock feature and an exportation feature. They would both be far more useful if…I could USE them. The ability to lock notes is a feature available for free in many other apps. Expo, however, is unique for a notes app. I understand why it is locked. In all honesty, I can indeed make the case that Bear is better than notes. I really do see this now. Yet Bear is better for me, not necessarily you.

I have never had so much fun taking notes in my entire life! Bear truly outdid themselves. This isn’t reinventing the wheel and trying to integrate into other pre-existing apps. This is taking what we already know in love and just polishing it so beautifully. It’s so simple and elegant organizing is a breeze and even though I’m struggling to export all of my notes between not taking apps, it doesn’t matter. Thank God somebody wise up and got rid of folders and just used tags as folders. It’s a brilliant idea and it’s making me reconsider using tags for the Apple ecosystem. I’ve used a lot of different note taking apps and this one by far is already my favorite and it’s day one. Their widget integration is phenomenal and thoughtful. It’s not just like recent this recent that. They actually thought about how can we utilize accessing this app from different places. I’m just so excited because now anything that I take note of Will has momentum I can take action behind it writing books scripting jotting ideas even reading is fun on this app. Needless to say my screen time is about to show new metrics and I don’t think it’s an unhealthy thing to say that I’ll be spending most of my time with Bear. Thank you, Bear team for your truly innovative work!