Checking in on Panda and the road to Bear 2.0

TL;DR: The new Editor is done! Now we’re working on the last few major components for Bear 2.0, which will be essential for our internal testing and the eventual betas.

Hey everyone!

We hope you’re having a good start to 2022. Ours is going well (all things considered…), in part because we reached a milestone that’s worth sharing: thanks to your testing and feedback, the new Editor is done! Major new features like tables, nestable styles, folding, and much more are finished, so it felt like a good time to start sharing some regular progress updates and our next steps.

Done so far

In the last few months, we put the finishing touches on some of the aforementioned features, including others like autocomplete for emoji and the many programming languages Bear supports. We have also brought the Panda editor into an initial internal version of Bear 2.0 on both macOS and iOS. That’s a nice, big step towards an eventual beta process, but there’s plenty left to do before that.

Our current tasks

The short version is that we are now focused on wiring together the various components of Bear 2.0. With the new Editor in there, we’ll spend some time to test it on both platforms and to hook up things like the new info panel and table of contents features.

Our official switch to CommonMark for markup also means we have a fair amount of work to do on Bear’s various export tools. For example, now that tables are nailed down in Panda, we’ll spend some time to translate them properly when exporting to HTML, Word, and PDF. Getting attachment previews working within Bear is also on our todo list.

See you in a couple weeks

That’s it for today, and we plan to share more progress in a couple weeks. If you haven’t checked out Panda with many of our major new features coming in Bear 2.0, now is a great time. Once we get closer to a beta, we’ll announce it on our (very infrequent) Bear Beta Sleuths mailing list, so be sure to sign up for that.

Thanks again for checking out Panda, and especially to everyone who has helped test and submit feedback. We’re excited to talk more about Bear 2.0 in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned!

17 Likes

Congratulations and happy new year!

1 Like

Great work Bear team! Your laser focused attention to detail is admirable and Bear’s simplicity as a focused tool is one of its biggest strengths. You guys do a good job knowing when to say yes to features, and when to say no. It really makes me feel like you guys know what kind of tool you want to build. However, thanks for listening to feedback too and making some of those changes!

1 Like

Thank you! Happy new year to you too :heart:

Thank you!

Happy to hear that you like and support our approach :heart:

1 Like

So about that update in a couple of weeks… :pleading_face: :sweat_smile:

Where can I find a list of this features?

1 Like