If you’re searching for a note-taking app that isn’t Apple Notes, Bear is likely to make the list of great alternatives. The makers of the popular notes are releasing Bear 2.0 today, which includes what they call the next-gen editor and more.
Bear is a go-to note-taking app for Apple Notes users who want more features not provided by Apple. Bear 2.0 goes even further with 20+ new features, six new themes, refreshed designs including on Apple Watch, and much more.
New features start with the next generation editor in Bear:
- Tables – Visualize information in rows and columns
- Hide Markdown – Formatting markup now hides for a cleaner look and easier reading. For example, the asterisks for bold will be hidden but will appear for editing when the word is selected
- Nested styles – Add multiple text styles to text. For example, bold and underline on the same word
- Folding – Fold away sections of text you no longer need to see (headings, todos, and lists)
- The new sketching tool and canvas (iOS) – A completely revamped sketching experience, new canvas tools, and Apple PencilKit support
- GIF support – GIFs can play in notes
- Link previews – A thumbnail preview of web links
- PDF previews – A thumbnail view of attached PDFs
- Image resize and crop – Scale and crop any image in a note
- Footnotes – Add reference information for a topic and easily navigate to it
- Document scanning (iOS) – Convert images into PDFs
- The all-new editing keyboard (iOS) – Quickly format text and add attachments from a custom keyboard (BIU button)
- The all-new photo picker (iOS) – now you can select multiple photos at once to insert in a note
- RTL Language Support – Support Right to Left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
The new app also touts more ways of organizing and finding notes in Bear. For example, Bear 2 introduces a new info panel that presents a table of contents based on heading and a list of backlinks within a note.
Bear also adds a new Home Screen widget that shows a random note as well as Lock Screen widgets for creating new notes, searching, and viewing the last edited note.
Personalization features include custom font support, new app icon choices, and six new themes for Bear Pro:
- Notes
- Dark Notes
- Rose Pine
- Rose Pine Dawn
- Tokyo Night
- Academia
Bear for Mac adds Shortcuts support for exporting and backing up notes, and each version includes a major speed boost. The makers of Bear say that version 2.0 is built on a new architecture that’s both more extensible and more cross-platform.
Bear 2 supports Markdown extensions which power features like tables, footnotes, and YAML. Much of Bear’s core is now cross-platform, too, meaning that large portions of its code now works across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Going forward, this should make it much easier for us to add new features.
Bear 2.0 is available for free in the App Store on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
The optional Bear Pro subscription for $2.99/month or $29.99/year includes more export formats, themes and icons, search within PDFs and images, and iCloud sync between devices.
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