APPreciation: Bear
This is the second post in a series on my blog, where I wax poetic about an app I love and use regularly.
The first post was about Hipstamatic.
This time I talk about the app I use the most, probably, both on my iPhone and my Mac as I'm using it for all of my writing: Bear.
At its core, Bear is an app to take notes in Markdown. You can then sort the notes into folders and subfolders by adding hashtags to the note[1].
I don’t use Bear for notetaking though, only for writing. A lot of different writing projects live there:
* drafts of blog posts, sometimes only consisting of a title idea I scribbled down on my phone.
* ideas for journals and half-baked ones. I’m publishing the first one to grow out of that folder this week. The next one is in the works.
* freewriting on things that could become novels. They stay in Bear until I’m ready to format them. I use hashtags subcategories to divide them as to their status.
* small non-fiction projects to write and edit.
* short stories to edit (and submit later on).
* lists of ideas I might like to write later
* I’m also using Bear to sort my old blog posts, and edit/update them with meta tags.
I also have folders for each of the blogging series I'm posting here, like happy snapshots and the Dear Creative Soul Letters. This way I always can easily check if I need to add more blog ideas to the respective folders.
The only action folder is called ‘blog this week’. This is filled with blog posts that are edited and ready to go up on the blog.
Sometimes I write posts ahead for the week, sometimes I just wing it. I always have at least one blog post in there, but most of the time there are quite a few, sometimes for weeks ahead.
Setting limits
I use Bear only for writing, and not for random note taking. I’ve found early on, that it’s easy to get Bear cluttered and me overwhelmed that way. I do take notes on random stuff, but those always get moved to either Keep or my journal.
My strict way of dealing with Bear means that I only have twelve folders, of which five are for my blog, making it so that I can see all of them in the main Bear screen.
A simple thing I love is that you can set your default fonts to anything, not just a small list of allowed fonts. I have my fonts set to the ones I use on my blog, as a kind of WYSIWYG.
All in all, Bear is perfect for me. It’s not overwhelming like Scrivener is, I can’t lose myself in formatting or other craziness. It’s also made me pretty well versed in Markdown, which is a bonus.
[1]: This is the reason why sometimes posts here have a blog hashtag, as I tend to forget to check for them hehehe