Introduction
Note-taking applications come in two types. Simple tools like Apple Notes and Google Keep give you a space to jot down ideas. On the other hand, advanced tools like Evernote, OneNote, and Obsidian help you make the most of your notes. The Bear app sits somewhere between these two categories. It appears to be a very simple note-taking app, but it includes some advanced tools, including optical character recognition (OCR) and a web clipping tool. Bear is only available on Apple devices, which limits its appeal. If you are looking for an app that does it all and is available on every platform, try the Editors’ Choice award winner, OneNote. Our favorite app for simplified note-taking is Joplin.
How Much Does Bear Cost?
Bear is available for free or in a Pro version at a cost of $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. The free version does not sync your notes, so you can effectively use the app on only one device. Free users get the document scanning feature in Bear and can export their notes to text formats, but exporting to PDF, DOCX, and other rich text formats is reserved for paid subscribers.
OneNote is a better option if you are looking for a free note-taking app. It is free and includes syncing and access to all features – the only limitations for free users are the storage capped at 15 GB. Obsidian and Joplin offer nearly full versions of their apps for free, but to add sync without any extra fees, you need to provide your own cloud storage. Bear only allows you to sync with a paid subscription.
The paid version of Bear, Bear Pro, adds more export options, access to different themes, and the ability to search for text in PDF files and images. It also allows you to sync via iCloud. The $2.99 per month price is inexpensive for a note-taking app. For example, Evernote starts at $14.99 per month or $129.99 per year.
Since Bear Pro uses iCloud for syncing, it is difficult to compare its value with similar apps. The free version of iCloud comes with a limited storage space of only 5 GB. Therefore, even if you pay for Bear Pro, you may also have to pay additional fees for larger iCloud storage, as packages start at $1 per month for 50 GB of storage and cost $10 per month for 2 TB. If you want a storage package and a note-taking app, you would get a much better deal if you buy Microsoft 365 Personal for $69.99 per year as it includes OneNote, along with a full suite of downloadable apps and 1 TB of storage.
Getting Started with Bear
Bear is available as apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. There are no versions for Windows, Android, or the web – this product is aimed solely at Apple users. (Credit: Shiny Frog / PCMag)
Download Bear from the App Store or Mac App Store and you can start using it right away. There’s no need to register for an account or provide credit card information. The app comes preloaded with several notes that teach you how to use it.
The Mac app has three panels. The far left, which is gray in the default theme, displays the list of note categories and tags. On the right is the list of notes. Finally, in the larger panel is the currently open note. You can double-click any note to open it in a separate window, making it easy to reference multiple notes at once. This basic interface will be familiar to anyone who uses Evernote or OneNote and many other note-taking apps.
Start…
Creating a new note is done by clicking the pencil and paper icon or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-N, and you can start typing immediately. New notes begin with a title. Press Enter after typing the title to jump directly to your note. Adding attachments is easy as you drag them from Finder into the note. Images appear as embedded. Previews for files in PDF format are shown.
Markdown, but Simplified
Bear has introduced many improvements in 2023, including some changes that made working with Markdown easier. Markdown is a streamlined way to add formatting to text, such as putting stars or dashes around a word to make it bold or italic. Bear hides formatting characters (i.e., stars and dashes) from any word you are not currently editing so that you don’t have to look at an ugly mess of special characters, which is convenient. Obsidian also uses this approach, but Bear goes a step further by providing a toolbar with buttons that can apply formatting, so you don’t have to use Markdown if you don’t want to. (Credit: Shiny Frog / PCMag)
Another noteworthy change is tables, which are created and managed more easily. Instead of relying on Markdown’s messy table system that involves tracking the character |, Bear has a system for building tables similar to those found in Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. The result is that using tables in Bear is easier than in Obsidian.
The essence of all these changes is that you can actually use Bear even if you don’t know what Markdown is. The built-in documentation of Bear reflects this stance – Markdown is mentioned very little. I think that true beginners in Markdown may find themselves confused at times, but with practice, they will learn – if they like Bear, that’s what matters.
Organization by Tags Only
Most note-taking applications allow you to organize notes using folders or similar structures. But not Bear. It relies entirely on tags to organize notes. To add a tag, simply include the hashtag in the note, which is the pound sign followed by any word. Do this, and the note will be tagged – and an entry for the tag will appear in the left sidebar. For example, if you write #general in a note, the word “General” appears in the left pane. Whenever you click on that word, every note containing #general shows up.
You can add as many tags to a note as you want. Tags have their advantages, mainly flexibility, as some notes are related to more than one topic or project, for example. It’s worth mentioning that some organizational systems of other note-taking applications – including Evernote and Apple’s Notes app – support folders and tags, which is perhaps a more flexible approach.
Bear doesn’t have many other ways to organize your notes except through internal linking. You can link one note to another, similarly to how you can in Obsidian. Bear calls this feature a Wiki Link, and the idea is that you can reference one note within another. Bear does not depend on these notes in the same way that Obsidian does, but it is nice to have the option.
Importing and Exporting
Importing existing notes to Bear is as easy as possible. You can import existing TXT, MD, RTF, and HTML files into Bear, which means you can easily bring in notes from any application that exports to these relatively common formats. Bear also supports importing entire notebooks from Evernote’s ENEX files.
Exporting
Notes are also a simple matter if you have a paid Bear account. Otherwise, your options will be limited. The free version can export the following file types: TXT, MD, Textbundle, and RTF. For HTML, DOCX, PDF, JPG, or EPUB files, you must be a paid member. Even with these limitations, it is reasonably easy to get your notes out of Bear. Using this product now won’t limit your options later. This should be praised.
Web Clipping Tool, But Without Many Options
Bear provides a web clipping tool for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on macOS. This tool captures what you are currently reading on a webpage and turns it into a note in Bear, allowing you to read it at any time and rename it. The tool works well. My main complaint is that clicking the web clipping button immediately saves a simplified version of the current webpage without giving you any other options. You cannot customize the tags or clip only part of the page or the whole page with ads, etc. OneNote and Evernote’s web clipping tools allow you to review and customize what you want to clip from the page and specify some other options before it captures the contents of the web clip.
Another feature of the web clipping tool in Bear is the ability to automatically add a default tag to anything you clip, although you have to dig into the settings to set it up. There is room for improvement here.
Functional OCR
Bear recently added optical character recognition (OCR). Any image or PDF file you add to the service is analyzed for text, making it searchable. Take a picture of a paper document, add that image to Bear, and you can search and reference the text in that image whenever you want. OneNote and Evernote have OCR, but in Evernote, you must have an expensive paid plan to access it. (Credit: Shiny Frog / PCMag)
The implementation of OCR in Bear is ideal for single-page documents – search for the text in the image, and it will appear almost highlighted. The feature also works for longer PDF files, with a caveat. Bear cannot display multiple pages of a PDF file in the same way that OneNote or Evernote can. In testing, I was able to search for text throughout a PDF file and see the result, but to read it, I had to open the file and re-search in the default PDF reader.
The implementation isn’t perfect, but OCR is still extremely useful and something that simpler note-taking applications like SimpleNote or Joplin do not offer.
More Than Just the Basics
Bear will not replace full-featured award-winning applications like OneNote or Joplin, the Editors’ Choice winners for note-taking apps. OneNote has features for almost every use case, and Joplin’s open-source nature makes it extensible in ways that Bear cannot be. Bear is also not as flexible as Obsidian, which we recommend for advanced users. But that doesn’t mean Bear isn’t worth considering. It has a beautiful interface and some advanced features. If you are a Mac, iPhone, or iPad user looking for a note-taking application that fits perfectly into this ecosystem but with more capabilities than what Apple provides, Bear may be the right choice for you.
Source:
Leave a Reply