The Bear 2 Beta has released

For what it’s worth, the Bear 2 beta does have OCR! I’ve found it works pretty well, too.

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Did they really say that they are going to give us the option to customize themes? I’ve been waiting for that!

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The beta version I’m using is good. I actually like it a lot, it looks really nice and I haven’t found any real issues. I have enjoyed the new keyboard and I’m a fan of the info panel that lists the backlinks with a preview and the table of contents.

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:+1:t2: Custom color themes - #12 by matteo - Feedback - Bear Beta

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Oh I see! It’s excellent they’ll provide to us that choice of creating our own themes. Thanks!

They say after the release though, so not imminent.

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Shiny Frog have announced their new pricing tiers once Bear 2 is released.

From the newsletter:

  • Existing Bear Pro customers keep the current price as long as you stay subscribed ($1.49/month or $14.99/year USD). Yes, even if you subscribe between now and when Bear 2 ships
  • After Bear 2 ships in a month or two, new customers will see updated pricing: $2.99/month or $29.99/year USD. Both have a one-week free trial

EDIT: Link to the blog post.

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It seems the price is doubling, I hope they he commit to be more active with the development of the app. Thanks for the heads up.

While I think Bear is a great app, I’m not sure it’s worth the new price. The old price was reasonable, given the pace of development, but with the new price I’m not convinced yet. They “only” develop the app and do not offer hosting. You pay for the latter yourself with your iCloud subscription.

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On the other hand, if you subscribe to it now, you can get it at the older price.

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I know and I use it since they launched. I mean I’m not sure I think Bear is worth the new price overall.

For the price, I think Bear is a good deal. Even at the higher, new price.

There are a few things that keep me from becoming a subscriber personally (no note versioning, no web version, data stored in a somewhat cryptic way and super slow dev work).

That said, I think the app is amazing and I can totally see why someone would use it regularly.

Bear for Web is in development:

Yes, and has been “on their radar” since I bought my iPhone 4. :rofl:

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You are right, they didn’t actually quantified “some months” :smile:

Is it possible at all to use third party app with iCloud sync on the Web? I’ve never seen that and thought it only a privilege of Apple’s apps

Mac/iOS Developers use CloudKit, not iCloud Drive, when they build apps that sync. CloudKit is fairly reliable depending on the developer’s implementation of it, and iCloud Drive isn’t. Bear’s implementation of CloudKit is one of the best I’ve tested.

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My iCloud Drive is currently down (Escalated to engineering and accepted as a problem at Apple) No files or folders are being uploaded or downloaded via iCloud Drive from any of my devices, at all.

Bear syncs fine and almost instantly. So does everything else that uses Cloudkit or otherwise uses iCloud but does not use iCloud Drive (e.g. Diarly, Photos, Calendar, Notes, Devonthink) Anything that has files in an iCloud Drive folder (e.g. Pages, Numbers and all my documents) just isn’t syncing.

As has been said before round here, iCloud is a collection of services and processes, not one thing. In my experience, iCloud Drive can be flaky. Other parts of iCloud tend to be rock solid.

if there is ever to be a web version of Bear, it would have to involve them setting up another kind of sync service to get the documents to a web server or doing all the sync on a service that allows web access to what’s stored there (e.g. as Notion does or as Craft does) Given Bear 2 has so far taken YEARS I can’t see what would be another complete rewrite coming soon.

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I had a similar problem a few months ago and had nothing in iCloud syncing for about two weeks. Including Bear. Somehow it fixed itself and now it’s generally working fine, but now I don’t trust iCloud at all, although I still use it as my main service, but always double-check that everything has synced

Twice I have tried to use iCloud in place of Dropbox both times I failed miserably. Completely flaky, sometimes working other times not and as I rely on Cloud storage I need something rock solid.

Dropbox for all its bad publicity just works.

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