Can Bear 2.0 Be The Note-Taking King?
There were times I used to extensively work with the Bear Notes note-taking application and found it fitted quite well into my early days’ workflow (fully tag-based, I should say).
The app was brilliant, smart, and minimalistic as f%ck — just like I wanted. However, as time passed, iOS and MacOS got several major upgrades, but the Bear App continuously looked like a frozen development. Can you imagine — 12 months without any updates?
I started to be very curious — what is actually going on? No way they could just drop this piece of software!
A couple of days ago I went to their website and was unlucky enough to see there were indeed no updates whatsoever. But just by coincidence, almost mistakenly, I opened up the Blog section and — can you imagine my surprise — found out the team is actually alive, and the Bear 2.0 development is running on full cylinders!
And it was clear why it was taking so long — the development team was working on a fully revised Markdown editor with tables support, backlinks, enhanced support of the Apple Pencil on iPads and so much more that this may very well be called a different application!
Just one week ago —on the 21st of March 2023 — guys at Shiny Frog released their first public Beta and made this brilliant application available through the Apple Test Flight program.
No time spent thinking — I’ve signed up.
The Good, The Bad, and The Serious.
The Good? In short — everything. The Bad? In short — Nothing.
Seriously.
If we skip those minor hiccups of the early beta version (like a bit bumpy animation on the 120fps screen of the iPhone, a one-time crash happened on the settings screen on iPad Pro, and kinda inconsistent handling of the link clicking using the iPad's Magic Keyboard) — I cannot overstate how much the application has grown in terms of its functionality without actually losing its minimalistic look and feel.
Bear 2 Features
Just take a look and tell me what else would you expect from the note-taking application in 2023:
- Consistent design, feature parity and seamless CloudKit-based sync between all Apple devices
- Very clean and beautiful interface with themes support
- Full Commonmark-based Markdown support
- Tables support (!)
- Backlinks (!!)
- Resizable Images
- Advanced Apple Pencil (via PencilKit) support with resizable canvas, shape-straightening drawing, multiple grid formats, and much more
- Custom actions keyboard on iOS devices (think of it as a lite version of a backslash-based quick editing options in some other apps like Craft or Obsidian)
- Multi-level nested tags with editable icons! ☑️ (no, not emojis, but very nice minimalistic icons)
- Notes with Tasks collected under a single Todo screen
- Ability to open notes in separate windows with a "pin on top" option
- Export in Markdown, Docx, Textbundle, PDF, TXT, HTML, JPG, RTF, ePub — are there any more formats in the world that you are aware of?
- Footnotes — behaving exactly like they are supposed to: with options to link to them from any place in the note body
- New in-note Search Engine that now looks for the in-note text, as well as the text on PDFs and Images
- Folding Headers / Sections
- PDF previews
- GIF animations
- Safari article export extension that actually preserves the web content you save in its greatest shape and form (actually, I cannot recall any other application that is able to save web content with such quality in 1 click)
- Spotlight integration (!). One thing that for some reason most applications are doing wrong — ability to find your stuff quickly. Bear puts your content 1 swipe away.
…and much much more.
Summary
It is exactly the same old good Bear but with soooo many more useful features — this thing will be a blast, mind my words, dear fellas.
If they manage to polish it by the time of the release — this little beast will be able to replace my Apple Notes (and your Obsidian) in no time.
It ticks all the boxes you may want from a note-taking application without being ugly or heavy or losing focus.
Keep it up, dear Shiny Frog team!
P.S. This post was drafted in #Bear 2# with a glass of #wine and very high expectations from the upcoming release. Eagerly waiting to review it once it is out.
