My trusty old iPhone 7 recently died (screen was cracked months ago, battery charger port finally loosened and stopped charging phone). So I did the logical thing, given the very low trade-in value for my model in its condition, and went out and bought a brand new iPhone 11!
I set up the phone and imported everything from the dead phone using a deft set of movements through familiar iPhone territory and the latest iCloud Backup. After adding games and pic editing apps, I quickly started looking for biology- and productivity-related apps. After being surprised to find there still isn’t a good GitHub-sponsored GitHub app for iPhone (guess they want you to do everything online, by cli, or with GitHub Desktop), I was pleased to find several apps for writing and blogging on the go. The one that I focus on here is Bear app for Markdown note writing.
Bear has a nice interface for creating, organizing, and even searching notes written and saved in text or Markdown format. Notes can be exported, with the downside that PDF conversion is only supported for users who pay for the PRO plan. At $1.49/month, or $14.99 annually, Bear Pro is admittedly cheap. But really who wants to pay for a thumb typing app when you could do all of this more efficiently with free software once you get back to your laptop/desktop, anyway??
The only justifications I can see for really investing time and money into this app (albeit at the risk of very tired thumbs! I would see stenosing tenosynovitis in your future!) would be for serious writers and bloggers who travel frequently, need to write in Markdown specifically, and use iPads.
Of the three good motivating factors above, I realized that only the second one really applies to me. And the reason is that I want to easily generate beautiful content in Markdown to transfer to rMarkdown or blog posts for my static blogdown blog. At this point, it seems I’ll just have wait and see how useful the Bear app becomes to me, but it is likely to be a mixed bag for me and others with similar writing interests to mine described above… only time will tell.
~J