There comes a time in the lives of many apps when moving forward means you have to tear it all down and rebuild. We’ve been hard at work building the future of the Editor inside of Bear, and earlier this year we started testing the fruits of our labor with the Editor 2.0 alpha preview on the Mac. Code named Panda, the new Editor has some much-requested features like tables, hiding Markdown, nested styles, right-to-left languages, and a few surprises.
Early in 2021, we plan to begin testing Panda for iOS. We could use your help.
What is this alpha test?
Alpha is an acronym that stands for Always Let enthusiasts and Professional testers Have A first look because many features are missing and unfinished.
For now, Panda really is just the Editor from Bear—no sidebar, no tag library. It’s as if we pulled the Editor out of Bear so we could focus on all the improvements we have in store for it.
Once the Mac and iOS alpha tests reach some of our goals, we’ll add it back into a full 2.0 version of Bear and do a proper, full beta test.
What’s in Panda for iOS?
Quite a bit! So far we have:
- Tables – Yes! With rows and columns!
- Hide Markdown formatting
- Nestable styles like bold and italics together, and even links and #tags in headers
- Right-to-left languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian
- Image resizing
There are even some exclusives to iOS!
- An all-new custom formatting keyboard
- Revamped Apple Pencil support (now using Apple’s official PencilKit tools)
- A document scanner
- A new iOS 14 photo picker
How can you help us test Panda?
Subscribe to our (very infrequent) Beta Sleuths mailing list. This list is separate from our main mailing list for major announcements and occasional surprises. Hint hint.
We plan to shine the bat signal in early 2021, except in the shape of a polar bear. Also, less of a spotlight in the sky (they’re surprisingly expensive!), more of an email.
Until then, we hope you can enjoy the holidays in a safe way. Beta Alpha Sleuths, we’ll be in touch.