We written about Bear here on Beautiful Pixels, so we’re sure you’re aware of how much we love this versatile, powerful, and scrumptiously designed note-taking app. ShinyFrog, the developers, have just launched version 1.1 of their pride and joy, and it is a delight to behold.
Besides the usual bug fixes, the devs have added several new features, including better tag management, a new theme, more fonts, syntax highlighting (particularly useful for programming), expanded export options (including TaskPaper), better import options (such as from Day One, Taskpaper, etc.), and improved support for new hardware.
Two features added in this release stand out – infinite nested tags (something we covered in our review), and better webpage handling. The former means that the app now allows you to nest tags within tags ad infinitum, unlike in the previous version, where this obfuscation only went down one level. The latter is amazing. Essentially, you can now condense webpages into notes with Bear. How this works is – while browsing a site, you invoke the Bear Share Extension. A new option right at the top (helpfully titled ‘Web Page Content’) is enabled with this update. When you select it, and press ‘Save’, Bear parses the entire page, and converts it into a Note, preserving the included links, titles, and subtitles. Think of this process as a ‘Reader View’ for the website, but baked into your note-taking app. This feature might not replace Pocket or Instapaper for you, but it’s a boon for someone who’d like to carry a lightweight version of a recipe, or a travel guide, in a note-taking app.
We love Bear, and this update has made it even easier to recommend it to you. This is a Free update to existing users and is available on the iOS and Mac App Stores.