Two thoughts:
- I agree that the “diagonal double arrow” button is a bit confusing. I did expect it to be a full screen button. However, after reading about the dragging feature of this button on the Panda alpha website, I figured it out. The icon itself is not intuitive, but the implementation is fine.
- In response to the thought on zooming, I actually prefer the static Sketch window. I use GoodNotes and Apple Notes currently (and have used Notability & PDF Expert by Readdle in the past) and if I’m to follow Bear’s desire to implement a powerful and simple markdown system all in one, I believe that the inline PencilKit editor meets this goal. If I want to draw something with any amount of great detail, I use Procreate. For me, my goal in a note taking app is to take notes, and I view Apple Notes and PencilKit as one step above a sticky note, that is nothing super detailed, but just enough room to add elements drawn by hand. The opposite end of the spectrum is Microsoft Whiteboard which offers an endless canvas which can zoom in and out ad infinitum, and while seemingly simple on the surface, leads to far more headaches than I would want in a simple note editor. GoodNotes does offer a middle ground of sorts as well as PDF Expert, but again I think of bears expressed philosophy of keeping things simple (including leaving the folder system out and relying on tags… a brilliant move) and the inline implementation seems to serve their design philosophy well.
In comparison with Bear’s previous drawing functionality, I was not a fan of it when considering the concept of the “note.” The previous full screen drawing solution in Bear, made me feel like I was leaving Bear into a separate app to draw (or write hand written notes) only to return to an app where my hand drawn document was half the size of what I saw full screen. In Bear’s previous rendition, I would purposefully have to write larger, so I could see my notes when I left the full screen app. As I have suggested, however, my main goal in drawing was to enter hand written text and make brief diagrams often drawing arrows from one place to another… so nothing very detailed.