Organizational Apps Series: Episode 4 - Bear

Organizational Apps Episode 4: Bear

Software Provider

Bear is an Apple product and is only available on Mac, both desktop app, mobile and online. As with the others, there is a free and a paid version which is US$14.99 per annum which is far cheaper than the other paid versions.

Operating Systems

As I said previously, Bear can only be used on Mac, not sure if they are going to launch Android or Windows versions, which in my opiniion is really limiting as these days many people work on both platforms.

Primary Use

Bear is only for note-taking and on the free version, can only be used on one device. If you want to be able to sync across devices, you have to get the paid version.

Basic Functionality

It's functionality is very limited and only gives you the option of notes, a to do list which is a check-list-style list and entries for Today which seemingly take on the same form as the Notes, so I don't really see the point.

You can use tags to help searchability but in the info notes they talk about using the £ symbol but the examples show the #, so that's a bit confusing. Also when I pressed Shift + 3 which types the #, it typed a £, so it changes the keyboard. Problem is, when you switch back to another app like OneNote, it still puts in the £—not helpful.

There are lots of text formatting options and there are themes to choose from but IMHO, they are not particularly exciting. All the content is placed in the middle of the work space and you don't seem to be able to use any other space on the page.

You can paste in external links and links from pages in the notes and you can insert a file but you don't seem to be able to paste in images— also not helpful.

Attachments are limited to less than 250MB and notes with more than 500,000 characters won't be synced across devices.

Hope this was useful and as always if you have any questions about Bear, please send me an email!