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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

“Bear” is a well-known note-taking and writing app https://bear.app/

That's what I thought this was - a bit of automation to publish right from the Bear app.

Bear is pretty dumb and limited. If it covers your use-case, great, but if you step outside of the narrow path at all, it fails.

I actually tried to use Bear as a MD-based publisher to my WP blog, and it just ran aground badly.

Ditto. I thought this is a new product by bear. Got me excited for a bit.

I wonder if trademark would kick in later for this.

What a world we live in that we have to worry about trademark issues for the name of one of the most common animal names a child could think of.

I mean, if they wanted to reserve the use of this common animal name across all industries, that’d be ridiculous, but it would seem pretty reasonable to worry about confusion between a cloud notes app and a cloud blog app. Certainly easier to think about it now than if this service takes off.

These are two different products. Blogging != note taking. And it doesn't seem like there's malicious intent. You can't use a generic name and expect others not to come up with the same idea.

Blogging !== note-taking, but you could definitely make the argument that a blog post is semantically a public note.

Apple, Fox, Shell, Target...any of these generic words ring a bell?

I’m sure there was no malicious intent, and it’s very possible that these two products will coexist without any further issue.

But as evidenced in this very thread there is the potential for confusion, which is the whole point of trademarks, and the reason why I’d have an easier time incorporating “Apple Surfboards“ than I would “Apple Keyboards”.

I wasn't saying that it isn't possible. I am saying that it isn't reasonable.

I saw the headline and immediately assumed it was an app by the same Bear company. I would guess that almost every single Bear Notes user would have the same reaction.

I'm going to go start a new shoe company named Puma. Hey, it's a common animal name, no problem.

Is it known among non mac/ios users? I've never heard of it before. Not to mention that by using such a generic name you're just begging for collisions.

I was trying to play on the word "bare". Yeah, I realised this a bit too late

I have to say I like the character based logo. Inventive use of Unicode I'm guessing.

It’s a fairly well known koamoji. Kaomoji is the horizontal counterpart to smileys and they can get very creative.

If you set your iPhone to Japanese keyboard it comes with hundreds of these build in

    ︎('ω'︎ )

Bold to assume this person has an iPhone :)

I copy paste them :) http://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-emoticons/

Apple users seem to think everyone uses Apple products.

Pro tip for iPhone users: juste type かおもじ (kaomoji) and slide the suggestion bar: you have all the kaomojis you want.

I was actually wondering why the note taking app was named "Bear".

Maybe they thought the same way as you do :)

This is a great, great app. I use it and love it.

I agree, bear is great. I miss it - I no longer have an iPhone and am Windows dependent :-(. I have made the best use of OneNote as I can - but the ease of categorisation of thoughts within the bear app will always be the best imo.

Try Joplin. As a heavy user of markdown for notes, i wanted something cross-platform across OSes and devices. Joplin fits my requirements perfectly.

I want to love Joplin (open source! markdown!) but I just can't get past how ugly it is. Its iPhone app is just a horrendous mishmash of colors and non-native UI elements.

I'm only a week into using it, but check out Notion. I really love it so far. The UI has blown me away in both beauty and how it gets out of the way.

Notion is amazing, and they recently removed the cap on the amount of "blocks" you're allowed to use on the free plan[0].

No affiliation, just a happy customer. :-)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786

Agreed, Notion is awesome.

I have even stronger feelings about Roam though. Notion is "better" than just abt anything else like it, whereas Roam is different -- there is nothing else like it.

Roam as in https://roamresearch.com/?

Yes!

What about org-roam

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server

Might be nice for Emacs / orgmode users?

I wish Notion had a self-hosted version. I store a lot of things in Joplin (previously Evernote) that I'm just not comfortable having on 3rd party servers :(

Joplin is cool because you can add your own css to customize the desktop app. I realize not every is interested in doing that, but I’ve been an advocate once I tweaked the styles to my liking [0]. Agree with you that the mobile app styles are very rough, but the community is very active and open to suggestions / improvements [1].

[0] https://github.com/amandamcg/joplin-theme [1] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/

Joplin looks really interesting - thank you for the recommendation!

Try out Notion. They recently changed their free plan to have unlimited blocks.

I have given them a go - but I had some privacy concerns. I may look into this again, thank you.

It's also a tool that helps generate a JSON compilation database [0] for Clang Tooling.

[0] https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

Thanks for linking that. I've been using the compile commands for autocompletion in vim, so it's nice to know I'm not tied to cmake for that.

There's about a million different note-taking apps now (and they're about 95% the same).

And zero of them are better than github's gist with dark mode and proper markdown support.

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