Since no one else mentioned it, you should definitely check out Keep It for handling all your non-text files. It supports pretty much every file type I’ve ever thrown at it, stores items in iCloud (or not—your choice) and only downloads them to your device if you tell it to, has built-in OCR for searching, has a good sharing extension, has good macOS and iOS clients, and supports x-callback-urls so you can link to your files from within a Draft.
License is subscription or one-time purchase for the macOS client, and subscription-only for iOS. Both are worth it, IMHO.
Yeah, I was a Bear fan for a year, maybe a year and a half. Their primary problem is their glacial development pace. When iOS 13 came out, there was a bug in Bear that caused text to run off screen—like it thought your phone was twice as wide as it actually was. It took them six weeks to push a fix. Folks have been yammering for years for them to add features (some smart, some dumb) and it took them forever to get to work on those features. In the meantime, they decided an emoji picker was a feature everyone wanted. No one did. They’ve gotten better, I guess, with their complete rewrite that brings additional Markdown features and a web-based client that helps folks who have iCloud blocked at work or whatnot.
Long/short, I’d never touch Bear again. Good design hampered by a slowwwwww dev team that doesn’t listen to their customers.
Also, if you’re thinking about storing attachments in Bear, keep in mind it only handles certain filetypes and they’re a pain in the ass to get back out if you decide to switch apps. They also use a non-standard version of Markdown (as standard as Markdown can be, anyway) that makes exporting to another app less than ideal.
@garbonsai Thank you for the detailed explanation. I will keep searching for something else then. Really my only issue with drafts is I can’t put screen shots in. If I could do that It would be perfect and I would just use drafts. PDF’s I can store in something like icloud using the linking feature.
have you considered a developers approach and use git (on ios via working copy on macOS console or pick any app like gitKraken). It is a version control system user interface that handles plain text and binary files. (images…)
It has a great preview and every change can even be attached with a short or long text (commit).
It might getting a bit of learning to get the tool behind it (git) but it might be worthwhile.
And if you need a preference
MacStories.com runs on git with anything from writing up to their great website.
Are you still using Notebooks as a companion app? I am using Obsidian but it is not without issues and Notebooks looks like it could a viable, if more expensive alternative.
Not any more. I stopped using it a while back. I can name a few different apps that could serve well— KeepIt (makes it easy to produce reference URLS and is affordable) and Documents (good for working with PDFs as well as other file management) have served me well. Notebooks has received a fair few updates since I stopped using it, so it might well be even more useful. It just depends on what your needs are.
What I’ve found is that while it’s good to know that I can build direct links between my drafts and other files, I actually don’t do this often. Over the past few years the vast majority of my outboard links in Drafts have pointed toward tasks (GoodTask) or mind maps (MindNode) and more recently Airtable databases or Muse boards. I might then reference other files via an associated task, map or board.
Thanks for asking the question; hadn’t really thought about this closely.