Bear is a beautiful, flexible new notes app for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. In less than two years, Bear has earned an Apple Design Award, an App Store Editor’s Choice award, and numerous mentions on Apple’s Today page for being a great way to capture ideas, write the next blockbuster novel, and much more.

Bear embraces portability, flexibility, and privacy. Your notes are written in Markdown and saved in standard formats, then organized with the power of tags and nested tags. Sketch with styluses like Apple Pencil, and grab links with app extensions. When it’s time to ship your notes elsewhere, export them to a variety of formats.

Upgrade to Bear Pro to unlock iCloud sync, a dozen beautiful writing themes, and even more powerful export options.

For iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Bear is ready with a big update to support their best features.

On iOS, Bear now works with Siri shortcuts for powerful automation. Who even types notes anymore? Nickelback, that’s who. Use Siri and the beautiful sound of your voice to create notes, open your to-do notes, and more. For Mojave on the Mac, free and Pro users can write in the all-new Dark Mode with our new free theme: Dark Graphite.

Most of Bear’s features are free to use, so grab it from the iOS and Mac App Stores. Learn more at bear.app, and subscribe to their infrequent newsletter for tips, user interviews, and more.

Our thanks to Bear for sponsoring MacStories this week.