Top 5 Note Taking e-Readers 2019: Ranked - Duration: 9:38. Goodereader 503,169 views. Best Mac email client for a feature-rich alternative to Apple Mail. Airmail takes the basic premise of an email client like Apple Mail and builds on it with more modern features and an emphasis on speed. There's robust support for all major email services, including Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, and IMAP or POP3 mailboxes.
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We generally do not share ETAs on upcoming features, as we feel they cause more harm than good. Making and supporting apps is hard, and we don’t want a surprise or delay to let you down because of an arbitrary due date. Features are done when they’re done. A web app is in the works. We shared.
We do not have plans for native Android or Windows versions. Our goal is to make the web app a Good Citizen in mobile and desktop browsers. Locking Bear with Face/Touch ID, and per-note encryption is planned for our next update, Bear 1.7. Our security code is currently being audited by a third-party company. We hope to release a public beta in a month or two. We do not have plans to fully support writing LaTeX.
However, our code highlighting feature supports LaTeX syntax. Hey and bear team,I was an almost religious user of Evernote, but felt that the project was being more and more abandoned since Phil Libin stepped down as CEO.I stumbled upon Bear very early, gave it a try and immediately became a paying pro user just to support the project. It felt like a fresh start.
Evernote without the clunk and with a lot of solid ambitions. I was really hoping that it would become my one-stop solution for everything 'memorable' (organizing projects, everyday notes, todos, reusable checklists, journaling, storing code-snippets, scrapbook/idea storage, bookmark tool).However over the course of the last year I found myself using Bear less and less. ? I'm sharing this to get your perspective on things and provide this as feedback to the devs:1) InterfaceSomehow Bear's interface and typography is sleek, but feels visually cluttered at the same time. Quite often I find myself being overwhelmed when I read or interact with longer heavily markdown-styled notes in Bear or even when browsing the list of notes with previews.It is especially bad, when you copy and paste content of websites and bulletpoint lists, images and other styling is ignored. A toggle to hide markdown syntax is highly needed.
1st level checkboxes and lists should be indented to create hierarchy. Level 1 and 2 headlines are almost indistinguishable. Width of the content area is far too limiting2) ThemesMost of the Themes don't really work for me. The standard one is nice, but lacks contrast. The high-contrast one adds to the visual clutter by putting too much emphasis on the styled markdown components.I know that it is possible to manually edit the style on macOS, but the changes obviously won't reflect onto my iOS devices. The dark colored are are too toned down or too aggressive. The other bright ones are too mute.
A theme-editor that syncs the changes to iOS devices is highly needed.3) macOS Spotlight integrationWhile the spotlight indexing on iOS is great, the notes are not indexed on macOS.Because there is no native integration, I tried to use Alfred and tried both available (third party) Bear workflows and none of them let me index the database and search for my notes. Because of this I often forget that Bear is even an option to find the data I'm looking for. Also the iOS spotlight integration only works if the notes have already been properly synced. I often found myself on mobile searching for some fragment that I had just typed on my MacBook, just to realize that spotlight can't find it as the note is not yet on my phone.4) I miss separate notebooksI use my devices for private everyday notes and side-projects, as well as for work. Those are very distinct realms, which I can't separate in Bear.
There are only 'level-1' tags, no hierarchy, which means to make any differentiation I need to additionally tag all my notes '#work' or “#private” to group them. But this is very error prone and only works if it is done for all notes consistently.5) Tag placement in notesThis leads me to Bear's tagging system.
It's a double-edge sword. I like that I am able to add tags (for example #todo) in-line to specific elements of my notes, but when I want to use it to categorize notes, as described in 4), the tags feel misplaced in the note:If I place them directly underneath the headline they are shown in the note-list's content preview and are redundant to the tag bar. If I place them at the very bottom of the note they are hard to find and changing requires scrolling. There should be a dedicated tag area above the headline, which during save or md-export is appended to the note at the bottom.6) Bear should acknowledge that not all tags are equalWhat strikes me as odd is the mix between inline actionable tags (example: #todo, #call), type tags (#idea) and those used to categorize and group notes (#project-name, #work). They all offer a different granularity: I will always try to clear out all my action-tags as quickly as possible. They type ones help to identify the note type across different projects and realms, whereas the category ones provide the specific context. A different notation for actions/types/categories would be nice, for example: @todo,!idea, #project.
Their tag bubbles get different colors and they can be rearranged and collapsed in the sidebar. Additional tag improvement: ALT-clicking a tag should remove it, as there is no 'x' (delete) that appears on hover and you can't double or even single click (as it opens the list of notes for that tag) on a tag to select it or place the text-edit cursor inside it. You always have to remember to set the cursor next to it to delete. Feels odd.7) Make tags smartAs described above, I tried using bear as my overall todo tool. I created todo-lists for various projects and tagged items with deadline dates, such as #DL-2017-12-11 (deadline) or #CW36 for a task that needed to be done in calendar week 36 and #MO-#FR to mark on which weekday I needed to do something during a workweek. The problem was delaying or rescheduling tasks got very tedious, as I had to edit the tag manually.
It would be nice to have 'smart (date) tags' that provide a small +/- symbol, which when clicked will increment/decrement the counter. For example: #MO -(+)- #TU or #CW50 -(-)- #CW49. Also bilignual tags would be nice.
I am from Germany and read both English and German sources on the web. When I stumble upon a memorable quote in English I will tag it #quote, as my mind is working in English at that moment. I ended up having tags #quote and #zitat (German for quote).
A nice user workflow would be to offer an option to merge tags and then get asked, whether you want that tag to remain bilingual and combine both originating tags. From then on it doesn't matter whether I search for or tag something 'quote' or 'zitat'. All notes of both tags will be included.8) persisting notes (shopping lists, todo lists)I was having a lot of persisting notes, which got changed multiple times a day, such as shopping lists or todo lists. It was visually hard to find the note that I was looking for, as the order always changed in the main notes list. Always the one that got changed most recently will be shown on top.
Sure, you can pin notes to the top, but if you have a multitude of those notes you'll end up never seeing the last edited notes on screen. It would be easily solvable to have a third category between 'notes' and 'trash', which ican be called 'sticky', where such tasks go, but the order has to be set manually by dragging and dropping.9) Links to foldersWhile I was using Bear as a 'one stop solution' for keeping track of my projects I also tried to create some kind of 'project one pager' note, which should help me keep track of my work. I maintained todo lists, pasted relevant research material (links, images etc.) and made some rough sketches.I then started to mirror that project structure to my file-system. Once a project left the drafting and idea phase in Bear, I worked on file system level in that project folder. To make it easy for myself I dragged the folder from Finder into Bear, which created a neat little link to said Finder-folder.
But those local folder links are indistinguishable from web-links. They got lost quickly in the reference material. It would be great to have a separate icon to distinguish various link types, such as linked local folders, mail-addresses etc. That would help a lot visually.10) TemplatesWhen I was giving Bear a chance to compose meeting protocols or use it as a diary/journal or my 'gym-log', I often felt that a templating function was missing.This could easily be done with a great user workflow: You create a new note and draft the template to your liking and then drag the note to a new category between 'notes' and 'trash', called 'templates'. There the notes are locked and you need to decide whether you want to edit the template or create a new note from it, if you click/tap on one to edit.It should be possible to use placeholders in the template for things as%today%,%week% or%year%.11) Sort by 'date created' timestampIf you edit an older note the timestamp changes, which makes it really hard to put the specific note into the right context later on, when checking the note list. As the 'date created' timestamp is already stored and hidden in the “(i)” information popup.
It would be very helpful to be able to sort the notes list ascending/descending by that date, as well.12) Drawing tool on the iPad Pro needs more workIt fundamentally works, but the overall approach of having the canvas inline embedded as an editable picture feels weird. I do understand that it is not a tool to take pages upon pages of handwritten notes.
I would love to see a Good Notes like feature to allow for simple form recognition, such as straight lines, rectangles, triangles, ellipses and circles and just straighten up the lines. You can compose a lot of good looking technical notes from those simples shapes. It would also be helpful if the elements (drawing, highlighting) would remain independently editable once sketched note was closed.
Also a lasso selection tool would be helpful. It would allow to reposition elements without having to erase large parts of the image over and over again.13) Code Syntax highlighting and line numbersI was also hoping for Bear to become my storage for Code snippets that I reuse. However the lack of syntax highlighting and limited line width makes it hard to read.Also due to the line-width induced word-wrapping it is hard to distinguish new code lines from each other. Add line-numbers and syntax highlighting.14) Backup as plain textI would love to see an automatic live backup of all my notes into a folder structure (locally or for example inside Dropbox) for emergency access.
The naming structure could be something like '/YYYY.MM.DD - TITLE/YY.MM.DD - TITLE.md' and besides that.md file the required attachments. Even if I lost all my iOS devices when travelling I could log into Dropbox and get the plain text notes.Thanks a lot for hearing me out.I would have loved to have used Bear more and made it my one-stop solution for all idea capturing, note taking and overall productivity, but there are too many limitations.I loved your open development approach and actually engaging with the community!I'll stick around for questions and keep my eyes open for any tips on other tools to use:). I would certainly say that this is thorough but I do perhaps think the problem lies in your expectations from Bear rather than what it was designed for.It is not an EN replacement and I do not believe it was ever intended to be, for that I would recommend DevonThink certainly on IOS.A lot of what your suggesting is good (code line numbering for example) and would not detract from Bears core purpose, but a lot your suggesting would. Bear is not a todo app it’s not the best place to store PDF’s and other reference material, it’s a place for markdown formatted text notes with a powerful tagging system (which like most powerful things can be abused or over complicated).Love Bear for what it is, but don’t blame it for being what it isn’t. I get that some people request things on here that are way beyond what Bear intends to be (though I’m not sure any of us truly know what Bear’s developers intend it to be), but I don’t think that’s what this post is doing.
Most of the things that the poster wants to see improved aren’t just part of the Bear app; they’re key components of Bear (including being discussed on the main page of Bear’s website).Just because somebody wants to use Bear in a different way than you do, or has features they’d like to see implemented, doesn’t mean that those are automatically bad ideas or that those ideas would automatically add bloat. I see many of the ideas as refinements discussed above as refinements to a good app, not bloat.Finally, while I don’t think it’s a wise idea for Bear to replace every function in Evernote, Bear seems to be intended at least in part to fill the role once filled by Evernote (as evidence by the section on Bear’s website showing people how to migrate from Evernote to Bear). This is exactly my take.Evernote was a 'capture everything' solution, like a unified inbox for everything: photos, audio, pdfs, websites, read-it-later articles.throw them all in.But I never used Evernote for this. I always treated it like a digital representation of a physical notebook.Currently I use Things as my todo app.
There I have areas, such as 'work', 'private' (everyday tasks), 'side-projects' and within those just todo items and if they become more serious they will be converted into a project. Early notes on a rough project idea go into the 'note' secion of a project in Things.
I use Things' tagging system to only tag my todos by actions or context, such as 'waiting', 'shopping', 'call'.If a project requires design work or coding I will create a project-folder on my local computer's drive for it. The main areas (work, private, side-projects) are actual folders in my user folder.
I pretty much mirror the structure.If a project requires a lot of communication I might even create folders in Mail for it.But almost all side-projects will require some form of note taking, from first sketches to collecting ideas and reference material. And this is where Bear could shine, but due to the limitations I outlined above it doesn't.Yet again.I don't want it to become like Evernote. I just want it to do one thing right. Be a one-stop solution for everything that is memorable and noteworthy and help me organize it.We have all those fancy tools (computers, tablets with pens, phones and synchronization across all of them) and yet we can't make proper use of it.Why do I want it all in one tool? – Scattering everything across multiple apps is not a good idea, as each app has different limitations, different approaches and different shortcuts, which you would have to juggle with. I think you are confusing my post with other ones in this subreddit. I never asked for Bear to store PDFs.
I also never used Evernote for this.I always saw Evernote (and Bear) as some form of extension of my brain. DevonThink can be as complicated or as simple as you make it. It certainly allows for organisational masturbation if that’s your thing, but will also work on a simple tag structure. I guess one underlying problem for me is that I highly dislike micro-managing my todos and objects (information of any kind, notes, snippets, files), but my job and my side-projects, as well as my hobbies are located in such vastly different fields, which adds to the multitude of 'information input channels' and therefor increases my time spent managing.Without some system in place I feel lost. ? A lot of noteworthy information just feels to slip through my hands. For my day-job I sometimes get sent slide-decks (PDF) from colleagues in advance to a meeting or a conference presentation as PDF or I have to read up on technical documentation (PDF). I do like to push them to my iPad using Airdrop or Pushbullet (if it's a link in the first place).
I found Notability to be a nice tool to annotate PDFs and scribble 'onto' them. It allows me to create a folder/project structure inside the app and will also live-sync a copy of those files to Dropbox upon every change. This allows me to quickly forward them via Mail from my Mac or push them to our shared server at work. Also for my day-job I sometimes have to read scientific papers and academic literature and use the Mac and iOS app Papers for it. It syncs via Dropbox to my iPad Pro, where I can take notes and highlight directly in the scientific literature (this was a game changer). However I struggle structuring larger corporae of such literature in an every-day scenario.
If I am all-in and devote all my time to one research topic, I kind of keep track of it 'in my head', but let's say 1 or 2 years have passed I feel like doing al the work all over again when puzzling together how specific papers and thoughts of different schools and general state-of-the-art research is linked. (I tried various mindmapping tools, but they need to be updated continuously and diligently, because at no point I will go back and 're-do' the structure, if I missed to add 6 months worth of thoughts.). For a side-project of mine I need to study scientific literature of an entirely different field and I read very information-dense books on that topic. The literature goes into Papers, but where to I write down my key-take-aways?. In my leasure time I also read a few non-fiction books per year on a kindle-like ebook reader, but very rarely take notes of key-take-aways, which feels like lost opportunity. (Something I wanted to change and hoped to use Bear for this, as the ebook-reader itself doesn't allow to take notes properly.). I also use said ebook reader to read longer articles that I saved via the read-it-later service Pocket on said devices.
Sometimes the articles – if they are not just blunt and brittle (tech-)news – spark a thought for potential projects or business directions or have overall memorable take-aways. I still use Feedly to browse through various RSS-feeds daily.
The topics are very mixed from work-related news over my personal interests to shopping deals and design (digital and offline) inspiration. I usually quickly skim through the news multiple times a day. If something sparks my interest I follow up on it. I also love listening to audiobooks on Audible and tons of Podcasts via Overcast, especially when I'm commuting or am in the gym.
I don't watch any TV, I mainly rely on YouTube and Netflix/Amazon Video. There are a lot of information-rich YouTube videos, such as quite entertaining conference talks on coding (side-projects of mine) and I sometimes get inspired for design tasks via the artwork in movies and series. Browsing reddit and topic specific bulletin boards or sites like GitHub, StackOverflow or CodePen will also make me stumble upon noteworthy or memorable thoughts or tools (especially in the realm of coding). I strongly feel that a lot of those noteworthy tidbits should not end up in my to-do list in Things until I actually want to utilize them. The same goes for various social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Even on those messy feeds of triviality by chance you can find something noteworthy or something that might spark a (design) idea. For some (team) projects I use GitLab for others Trello, they can be to-do systems on its own, but often I find myself mirroring todos from those tools into my own to-do list.
But I need some place to draft/sketch something or take notes of my own thoughts, apart from the team ones on features and directions. I hoped Bear would solve this. I used to store logins, IP adresses for server-connections, account numbers etc. In Evernote and later Bear in case I need them, but for security reasons I moved them all over to 1Password, despite it taking more effort to enter them properly. In addition I do some form of sketching. I used to carry a notebook of blank A4 paper sheets with me, but was always bothered that I did not have at least one or two Copic markers with me to set accents, when I needed them.
The iPad Pro, while limiting me to its screen size and the capabilities of the drawing tools ( Procreate or Adobe Draw), I do like that I only have to carry that device with me and can browse through a huge backlog of sketches and have all colors at my hand. And on top of it all there are the various forms of communication: In-person, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (voice chats, especially during team coding sessions) and the worst of it all Mail.
From all of that can come noteworthy information or to-dos they need to go somewhere.I strongly feel that my thoughts nowadays follow the various input channels of information and are scattered all over the place.As already described: On my Mac I try to mirror the folder structure of my todo-app and potentially my note-taking app(s) to my hard-drive inside of my user-folder. This results in a structure like this:. Work/Project 1. Work/Project 2. Work/.
Private/General. Private/Shopping. Private/. Side-ProjectA/Design.
Side-ProjectA/Code. Side-ProjectA/. Side-ProjectB/.If possible I try to use symlinks to 'integrate' folders that are located outside of my project folder. I rename them for example to 'Notability/ProjectA' and use macOS tags to tag it as a symlink. The colored tag-dot in Finder makes it easy to identify those folders that are not natively 'inside' the project folder and helps to find all symlinks (yes, I know can be done via terminal, as well).All those project folders and their contents are also synchronized to my NAS at home (the work data is synchronized to the server at work) and all the data is available from anywhere in the world.Also, if a project is done, I clean up. I push the whole folder to my NAS' archive folder.
It has the same basic structure of work/private/side-projects., besides keeping books, academic literature and Mails, every other project file will be archived.I used to also export Evernote notes as HTML and store them inside the archived project's folder, but in Bear I just kept them so far. I didn't use it that extensively anyways.So I only keep the projects on my drives/devices that I am actually working on.So far so good.but where do my notes go that connect all of that efficiently, especially as I want to make use of the technology and being able to search/edit/regroup etc., which is not as easy on paper.I somtimes ponder whether it wouldn't be more efficient to just carry a paperback notebook and write down everything in chronological order: Work-related things, private to-dos, quick notes, sketches, just not caring at all about tags or categorization.
If I can't remember that I took note, it must have not been important enough. – Maybe that's the way to go.
These comments go somewhat to the core of current OS, GUI and file systems. They are hierarchical and primarily text based. The Mac went somewhat to address this with higher aesthetics and by hiding the file system but we needed and still need an interface that is just A PAGE., capable of being grouped into a bunch-of-pages. Various ‘drawing’ apps try and achieve this but all fair as they are unable to handle text (within an essentially graphic rich page).In my dream I work on a page.
I drag it to another page and a dynamic link is automatically created. This group of pages can be seamlessly be made public, private, or put within my paywall with short extracts publicly accessible. My local versions sync with published or not as I need. They can be snapshots or constantly updating feeds or stream of my interlinked interests.Facebook is rapidly approaching this but it’s still a clunky interface. (Oh why oh why did we end up with 5+ Comp eating os? I include iOS and iMac and probably iPads as 3 separate, android, MS and their surface and phone ecosystems plus various.nix flavours).
I believe in diversity but this is crazy country.More importantly. Facebook owns MY STUFF! Oh yes it didn’t seem to matter way back but look now! Half my life and memories are buried in their infrastructure and can I get it back‽ someAnyway back to the topic. I’m with EN for a good while but I want to publish too! To web and to print.
I’ve searched around and Bear comes close. EN with postash.io is another option. I looked at DayBook and a few more. It’s not quarkXpress or (ugh) publisher, indesign or the zillion layout programs with pixel perfect control.
I need that but I need workflow. Simple, fast, easy, cheap, open source based, Team shared documents, gdocs come close. Then I want to pipe it to my printers around the world and know they will print a quality version from the pdf-like files I send them.WordPress is near but overkill and doesn’t come close to having a print friendly pipe out.Markdown approaches a universal formatting standard but Christine if there isn’t 24 flavours of that as well.I’m good at this stuff but I still cry a dry tear sometimes.Please Bear, answer my prayers and be the universal program/app for EVERYDAMNTHING!. (I drafted this I Bear:) )I’ve come from the notes are just text files school so a lot of the stylistic and smart stuff eg. Templates and themes are not something I am the least bit interested in.While it’s something I probably wouldn’t use, being able to hide the formatting is probably a good idea. The problem comes in providing a user interface for editing hidden formatting.Mac spotlight integration is a must, if it isn’t already there. A bunch of other stuff you mentioned as missing is there and I’m not in front of my Mac to check.Editing tags is a bit clunky.
I find myself deleting the whole tag when I meant to edit it by deleting from the end.Have you tried OmniFocus or Things? I think you would be way happier using those for your Todos and projects. Bear is a bad Todo app.Some (all) of the syncing related stuff is a consequence of using iCloud and I doubt there is anything the devs can do about it. And writing their own syncing mechanism isn’t something I would recommend anyone do. I know of several apps that have been sunk by that.
DEVONtechnologies has released the final, non-public-beta version 2.0 of all editions of its information manager DEVONthink as well as of the smart note-keeper DEVONnote. Version 2.0 of DEVONthink and DEVONnote brings an immense number of improvements over version 1.x and many enhancements over version 2.0 public beta.