Bear is a beautiful, flexible writing app for crafting notes and prose. Designed by an Italian design firm Shiny Frog the note-taking app has seen a recent spate of popularity as a replacement for apps like the bloated Evernote, primarily due to its simple design and quick speed.
Shiny Frog has been keeping Bear up to date, with its yesterday’s 1.2 update (as noted by MacStories) adding some new features in the form of sketching, custom app icons for iOS, and support for Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility feature. The sketching feature is the most notable, adding a simple digital drawing board for the iOS version to add doodles and diagrams to notes.
Drawings can only be created and edited on the iOS version, not the Mac, however, and it doesn’t support the Apple Pencil’s more advanced features
This update is on the heels of version 1.1 released in March, which was a more substantial update, adding things like Touch Bar support, merging multiple notes, and more features for tags.
Shiny Frog team have been working to keep Bear updated, especially as the app runs on a subscription model for advanced features — keeping subscribers happy tends to be a good way to keep them as subscribers.
Still, there is a cautionary lessons to be aware of here in Evernote — a large part of Bear’s appeal is in its more minimal design, and the more features it adds, the closer it could resemble the bloated apps it’s trying to replace. Thankfully, we’re not there yet.
