Bear App for Writers and Note-Takers Gets Huge Update

The Bear app has long allowed you to nest tags, so that you can tag, say, your vegetarian recipes with #recipes/vegetarian, “recipes” being the parent tag and “vegetarian” being the child tag.

Now, Bear goes further by enabling you to structure your tags in infinite hierarchies. For example, if you want to use dates to sort your notes in the manner of a journal, you can use tags like #2017/03/22/night. You can then easily view notes for each tag level by tapping the parent or child tags in the sidebar.

The Bear app also features an iOS app extension that allows you easily create new notes, or append text and files to an existing one, from content in other apps.

This extension has been upgraded with the ability to easily grab the main contents of webpages and save them into notes in the Bear app — it’s like automatically copying the Safari Reader view of a webpage into a Bear note.

While viewing a webpage, just tap the share icon, tap the Bear icon in the share sheet (enable it first if you don’t see it), tap Web Page Content, and then tap Save. A new Bear note is then created with the contents of the webpage, minus ads and other extras.

The latest update to Bear, which brings the app to version 1.1, includes the aforementioned noteworthy features and plenty more besides.

These include support for Peek and Pop to quickly preview notes and attachments on 3D Touch-enabled iPhones, the ability to exclude search terms using the “-“ operator (e.g. recipes -broccoli), a new free theme, a number of new fonts, and various improvements to importing, exporting, and editing.