Bear is a note-taking application by Shiny Frog. Bear 2 launched for

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

and

iPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple for its iPad line of tablet computers. It was given a name distinct from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones to reflect the diverging features of the two product lines, suc ...

in July 2023.

History

After three years of development, the initial version of Bear was released in October 2016 for macOS, iOS and iPadOS. It was released as free application, with an optional paid subscription, that unlocks more advanced features, e.g. note syncing and app themes. In the same year, the application received Apple's Mac App of the Year Award. In 2017, support for the

Apple Watch The Apple Watch is a brand of smartwatch products developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple. It incorporates activity tracker, fitness tracking, Health (Apple), health-oriented capabilities, and wireless telecommunication, and integrates wit ...

was added and Shiny Frog received an

Apple Design Award The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός ...

for their work on Bear. Within one year of the initial release, the team started to work on version 2, while still releasing continuous updates for Bear 1. To implement all the features planned for Bear 2, the development team had to build a new text-editing system, code-named Panda. This new system is also needed for a future Bear web application. Version 2 was eventually released in July 2023 for macOS, iOS and iPadOS.

Features

* notes are written in

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used ...

* (nested) tags are used to organize the notes * export to

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a lim ...

, Markdown, TextBundle and RTF * export to

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

, JPG,

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, DOCX and

ePub EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

* * search inside PDFs and images * * synchronization with

iCloud iCloud is the personal cloud service of Apple Inc. Launched on October 12, 2011, iCloud enables users to store and Data synchronization, sync data across devices, including Apple Mail, Calendar (Apple), Apple Calendar, Photos (Apple), Apple Ph ...

* * GIF support * support for sketches * web clippers for

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

and

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

* note encryption * * marks features that are only available to paying users

History

Features

See also

References

Further reading