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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.

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I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that.

There must be a good reason for why its taken so long, they've created a solid app so it doesn't make sense that they dropped the ball on the web version.

Agreed on all points. I just happen to only use it on mac. My guess is that other things came up, or it just wasn't as lucrative as they were hoping. For most non-markdown notes I just use physical notebooks with satisfying Muji pens.

Yeah I think they started with good intentions and hit some kind of blocker

Yeah it’s been extermely slow with the updates. The Bear 2.0 is currently on Mac-only beta but not yet open (unless you join their beta forum and ask for access), but even then, it doesn’t have the web app. I’ve seen the Bear team say that they did a full rewrite (in C++ I think?) so that it would be easier to implement the web app in future but who knows how many years in the future that is.

I may be wrong on the features on Bear 2.0 but it doesn’t seem like a lot new features. A full rewrite in C++ may be why it’s taking so long but it definitely feels like they’ve quietly dropped the web version.

It’s fair enough if they want to focus on the Apple ecosystem but they let people think they were developing the web version for a while.

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