Review of the Bear App

I’m Signor Dev and I’m back with another opinion.

Do you know about Bear? It means “to endure”, but it also is the name of a note-taking app in the Apple ecosystem.

The Bear app.

Why use Bear, when there are literally billions of note-taking apps out there, including Apple’s very own Notes? Your author did use Apple Notes for a long time, since it is free and simple. It needs no fussing, and easily syncs between iPhone (when on-the-go) and Mac (when not-on-the-go).

However, Notes had a number of serious issues that made me interested in alternatives. Bear with me:

• No way to export all notes. There are some dubious third-party scripts that kind of work, but the exported notes had empty formatting tags in random places, making for messy output.¹
• Numerous bugs, both on desktop and mobile. Trying to reorder list items, whether on desktop or mobile, was an exercise in consternation. Also, I would often try to select some text and Notes would randomly go into drag-and-drop mode. I never figured out the trick to selecting text consistently.
• Syncing was buggy. I’m seeing a pattern. Why is a simple note-taking app, from a giant software giant like Apple, full of bugs and usability issues?

Naturally, this state of affairs was intolerable for a seasoned Software Gentleman such as myself. I feverishly began researching hundreds, nay, thousands of note-taking apps, looking for the optimally best one, taking notes about each option in Apple Notes. Actually, I only tried Bear, but I just know it’s the best.

Why Bear?

Exporting

In Bear it is trivial to mass-export from any folder, including the folder containing all of your notes. The output is in Markdown, making exported notes easy to track in version control.

Clean Interface

Bear is simple and clean. It is like a sleeker version of Notes, so users of Notes will find the interface familiar. I was able to learn the ropes in a matter of minutes.

Seamless Markdown Editing

Everything is Markdown, and Bear shows you the formatting characters when the cursor is next to them. But the formatting characters are hidden most of the time, and a WYSIWYG output is rendered in their place. Bear strikes the perfect balance here.

Simple but Powerful Categorization

When it comes to folders/tags, Bear again strikes a great balance. It uses a simple system of tags that can have embedded hierarchies, allowing the user to choose whether they want folders or tags. It also makes it possible to have the same note in multiple folders, if you’re cool enough to want that.

Seamless Sync

So far the syncing has just worked for me. However, Bear does use iCloud as its sync engine, so I guess it’s only a matter of time before something wacky wackytranspires. transpires

Not Buggy

I’ve only been using Bear for a few weeks, but I’m confident that there are no bugs (that I know of), except for a couple that I did find, actually. Bear in mind that note-taking apps are deceptively simple. Displaying a single character on the screen takes about one million lines of code (a statistic I just made up). Therefore, to display a hundred characters requires one hundred million lines of code. This quickly adds up to an unbearable amount of code, just to read this blog post!

Great Mobile Version

The mobile version works really well. The best part is the easily-accessible formatting menu with buttons for easy formatting. There is no indenting by swiping, which is actually great for usability. Swiping in Apple Notes was finicky, sometimes navigating, sometimes selecting text, and sometimes not working at all. To indent and reorder text, Bear just has buttons that do that.

Conclusion

Bear is a great app. It is simple, but it made all the right choices in terms of design and usability. As a new user of the Bear app, I highly recommend the Bear app!

Footnotes

1. I tried two scripts that both had this issue, suggesting that the random tags were due to a bug on Apple’s part. This made it hard to read or restore the exported output. Tags also seemed to jump around within the same note over time, causing messy diffs in version control. ↩