Hello Bear folks. Congrats on developing Lettera. Given your success with the truly splendid Bear app, I’m looking forward to watching Lettera’s evolution.
Please forgive my non-technical question, but not being a programmer, I view apps through a usability and aesthetic lens.
Would you clarify how you’re positioning this app alongside Bear? That is, given the degree of overlap in functionality, why have you chosen to develop a separate app instead of building into Bear those functions that do differentiate the two?
Thank you for making my writing life a joy (with Bear)!
Hello Hayes, and thank you! That’s lovely to hear, on both counts
To be honest, we don’t see much overlap between the two at all.
Bear is a “shoebox” note-taking app: everything lives together in one library, with lots of features around organization, quick capture, and sharing. It’s your personal digital brain that syncs across every device you own, meant to be used often and kept close for whenever you need to look something up.
Lettera is a document-based Markdown editor: it edits files in place, on disk, and has no organizational features of its own (nor sync). Your files are organized however you keep them on disk . It’s meant for more sporadic use.
We like Markdown, so they share that. In our opinion that’s where the overlap ends.
So why make Lettera? Because we kept getting requests for an app like this: one that could open files that don’t live inside its own database, and that works as one more tool in your toolbox rather than a place to keep everything.
And to answer your question directly, we deliberately chose not to build this into Bear. Editing external files just doesn’t fit the way Bear is designed (that shoebox library is the whole idea), and we’re wary of bloating Bear with features that pull against what makes it Bear. A separate, focused app felt like the correct fit.
Wikilinks most likely. Tags aren’t on the list atm, or at least not the way Bear does them. Since Lettera is geared more toward editing shared documents, sprinkling those with tags wouldn’t be a great idea, so it’s unlikely tags will be a first-class citizen in Lettera.
Thank you for your thorough and transparent reply, Matteo. That all makes sense.
I’m certain you have a lengthy list of tasks associated with developing Lettera to meet your market’s demands. Here’s one more.
As a non-tech user, I might add to that list a blog post or video that elucidates the differing use cases for each application–ideally adding Marked 3 to the mix–so that interested parties may see a complete workflow. I don’t think I’m alone in having felt overwhelmed by all the available note-taking and related apps on the market, and Bear has solved that problem for me. If Lettera is indeed another well-targeted and fully developed application, it would be helpful to have a very clear roadmap that new users may follow.
Again, Bear is simply terrific, and I continue to discover just how functional it is. Your team’s attention to detail, without creating an overly complex application, really shines through in daily use. It is a very refined tool. I trust Lettera will be likewise, and I wish you all the best in making it a market success.
