How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes

If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am-writing a blog post about Apple widgets.

You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?

A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.

In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.

I knew that Bear’s implementation of widgets was top-notch. Widgets are an afterthought in Craft, and Obsidian doesn’t offer them at all. What I didn’t understand was that a widget exists in Bear that does something you can’t even do in the app itself: the random note widget.

Before I dive into how important the random widget has become in my notes system, let me explain the problem it solves.