Here's the review on MacStories https://www.macstories.net/stories/why-im-considering-bear-as-a-notes-app-replacement/

The developers rushed an update to the mac store over an iOS IAP bug, so that's why they haven't announced it officially yet.

It's featured today in "New Apps We Love" on the iOS store.

I have it installed on everything in sight, and it's a very nice version 1.0; the last-minute nested tags feature is especially cool (although the concept is slightly flawed; I can't see an obvious solution, however. It's not unlike the approach used by CintaNotes on Windows). It's undoubtedly one of the most elegant Markdown-based editors out there - I especially like the simplified Markdown it uses; it's high time others moved over to a simple solution like this (bear in mind it also supports standard Markdown if that's what you prefer).

Very impressive! Once they introduce true folding, it'll be hard to beat! The stand-out feature is undoubtedly the ease with which one can import web pages and turn them into instant Markdown notes. I imported an entire ebook last night (around 200 pages), and after a brief delay, the whole thing was neatly inserted in a note, complete with links etc. For such an apparently lightweight app, that's impressive! The search function is also handling this large volume of text with aplomb.

Good start! I look forward to seeing Bear goes in the future.

I've just written to Federico mentioning a couple of things he left out of his review:

- web page import (definitely an impressive feature) and
- the search function (highlighting, constrained by tags, etc.).

The search function is a very powerful feature, and works much better than Apple Notes in that you can constrain searches by tag(s). There's also a nice to-do search function that will find completed/unfinished tasks and various other to-do-related things (not dissimilar to TaskPaper). Finally, there's a rather neat feature that Federico doesn't mention: if a note has tasks in it, a little red bar appears at the bottom of the note title in the list of notes indicating how many of the tasks in the notes you've completed. As a simple visual clue, this is extremely elegant.

It's pretty. Before I plunk down $15 annual for 7 other dark mode styles and PDF export I'd like to see some evidence that Bear has amazing features no one has ever done or done as well -- other than being pretty.

Just curious if anyone else tried their previous work.
Pixa was a hot mess.
The support responses consisted of 'hey, we tried' responses with few solutions.

Bear sure does look pretty though! I hope it does them well.

I have not used earlier software by this team, but their support staff has been first rate for Bear. During the beta period and even after launch (when I'm sure they were very busy) I received a lot of excellent support, replies to my feedback, etc. In fact, it is this, more than the shipping 1.0 product itself, which has me so excited about Bear.

bigspud wrote:

The support responses consisted of 'hey, we tried' responses with few
solutions.

Paul Korm wrote:

It's pretty. Before I plunk down $15 annual for 7 other dark mode
styles and PDF export I'd like to see some evidence that Bear has
amazing features no one has ever done or done as well -- other than
being pretty.

The main feature of Pro is not the dark mode, or PDF export, but sync. They have built their own sync service on CloudKit (different from iCloud) which I find to be much better than the sync used by some other apps (such as Ulysses). I also think it is a mistake to see form and function as separate. While that may sometimes be the case, good form often has benefits for function.A function that is difficult to use isn't very functional! As to what features are there, I think the review I linked to as well as previous comments in this thread make it pretty clear what those functions are. Finally, you needn't pay $15. You can pay a buck fifty to try it for a month before signing up for an annual subscription. I personally think it is foolish to move software if you are completely satisfied with your current solution, but if you are looking for something better than what you have now, Bear might be worth trying out...

The developers also seem to be offering a one month free trial for annual Pro subscriptions (one week for monthly subscriptions).

CloudKit is not "different from iCloud" -- CloudKit is Apple's framework for iCloud sync and collaboration. Apple Notes uses the CloudKit framework, for example. As you mentioned, Ulysses decided to go in a different direction. I've had endless problems with Note's sync failures, so I hope Bear overcame those difficulties. Like Notes and Ulysses, your data is buried in non-obvious folders deep in ~/var on OS X -- this is not necessarily an issue, but users should be aware there is a certain degree of lock-in (better to call it an "access challenge" rather than lock-in) until they export a file from Bear. Also, curiously, in my opinion, for a modern OS X app, Bear does not offer a share extension on OS X. Since many of us use editors as a path in a process to get data from one point to another, not participating in OS X's Share infrastructure is miss.

Oh, and yes I participated in all the betas on OS X and iOS, aslo.

This was an error -- the share extension is available on OS X. Apologies.

Also, curiously, in my opinion, for a modern OS X app, Bear does not offer a share extension on OS X.

Paul Korm wrote:

CloudKit is not "different from iCloud" -- CloudKit is Apple's framework
for iCloud sync and collaboration. Apple Notes uses the CloudKit
framework, for example.

As I understand it there are three different things:

- iCloud Drive, which is a file based sync engine used by apps like LetterSpace which keep all their documents as plain text files
- iCloud Core Data which is a now depreciated database sync service via iCloud which was rather clunky
- CloudKit which is Apple's new database sync service (used for Notes, as you said)

CloudKit is free only up to a certain point, at which case developers do need to pay some fees.

Does anybody know if there is a user manual or video overview of it? I cannot find either, I really don't like wasting time learning features by stumbling into them while shooting in the dark. This is a gripe that I have with the very-similar-to Bear program called Ulysses.

Well, I'm currently using Bear on all my iOS devices and my Mac, and it's rapidly becoming my go-to notetaker. That's because it does indeed have a sharing extension, plus a very good web page import facility (which could be further improved by the addition of the source URL, but that's a detail). After a couple of issues with synchronisation, the whole sync side appears to be working very well and very quickly - I suspect the initial issues were typical examples of first-time-itis, and were resolved by force-syncing (i.e. editing of the notes involved).

So my two major note-taking apps are now Bear and Apple's own Notes (the latter because you can "lock" notes in a way that's not yet supported by Bear, although apparently it's on the roadmap). Bear is substantially faster than Ulysses when launching, and more flexible on importing (it's capable of importing Evernote .enex files, for example).

I like Ulysses, but Bear has something Ulysses doesn't - you can instantly filter notes simply by clicking on tags in notes; in Ulysses you have to set up a filter, you can't simply click on tags (a peculiar shortcoming). Also, Ulysses doesn't handle todos. But then, you could argue that Ulysses is a writing app, it's not an all-rounder.

I tend to agree with Jeffery that it's a shame proper manuals/instruction videos don't exist for Bear or indeed Ulysses. Not least because you only gradually become aware of features that would actually be great marketing USPs (such as Bear's little bar that indicates which notes have todos in them and how far you've progressed with them). In Ulysses' case, it took me a while to work out how customised themes work; I could find no detailed instructions on Ulysses customisation.

With Bear's promise that they'll be introducing folding in a later version, and Outlinely for iOS lurking on the horizon, the whole cross-platform Markdown notetaker space is becoming very exciting!

Oh dear, how embarrassing: I said Bear doesn't copy the source URL when you copy and paste a web page or part of a web page into a note by pressing the button (installed as a Safari or Chrome extension - I don't use Google Chrome, but do use Chromium). Actually, it does in both cases, very neatly.

Bear has seriously grown on me!

I too am liking Bear the more I use it. I find the website FAQ does have a fair amount of information. I had mistakenly thought they removed a beta feature to have nested tags, but via the FAQ I realized that they had just changed how it works. Before it would automatically nest all related tags, causing a lot of duplication in the sidebar. Now one has to explicitly create a nested tag. For instance #toptag/subtag will create a nested "subtag" under "toptag." I like this a lot as it is a nice compromise between tags and folders, and I actually wish other tagging apps would copy this. I do hope, however, that they implement autocomplete for tags as I often type the wrong thing (i.e. #apple vs. #apples) and end up with two similar tags... (I believe that autocomplete is planned.)

To clean up my tags I exported my files to the desktop and ran multi-file search and replace using the free TextWrangler app. Then I deleted the originals and re-imported them to Bear. I find the result even more useful than the weird combination of folders and tags in Ulysses which never quite worked for me (as discussed above, Ulysses implementation of tags is rather incomplete).

Last week, I reviewed all of my options for what would become my default note-taking app. I have used Scrivener, and I like it for more polished end products, but not for notetaking. I am so frustrated with Tinderbox, I have decided to not even bother with it until there is better documentation. VooDooPad doesn't seem well-suited for enormous numbers of notes. So I played with Ulysses and Bear, and settled on Bear.
Today, I started inputting notes and, within about 30 minutes, the app slowed down to a crawl (with 11 gb of RAM free). I had pasted two JPEG screen shots in it, and think that might have caused the issue. But that is a serious problem for me (I'm working on an invertebrate zoology course to be taught in fall).
Have any of you experienced this? When I say "slow", I mean the keyboard falls a word or two behind the letters showing up on the screen.