I praised the note-taking app Bear before for its memory; the app would always remember your last-visited note and the precise place within it, even if it had every right to forget it.

But there is a general problem here: memory that kicks in when not expected can be frustrating, as you have to undo its results and “reset to normal.” For Bear that’s not a problem, though, right? The whole iOS has a nice “tap near the top to scroll to the top” gesture that would work here as well, making it easy to recover if you return to the note where you last happened to type.

Except, with any writing app, the very bottom is as valid of a destination as the very top.

Bear designers understood it and tried to solve it in a new way, by adding two gestures: a two-finger swipe up takes you to the very top, and a two-finger swipe down to the very bottom:

It doesn’t quite work as well as I hoped – for some reason, it scrolls way too far down, and does feel a bit sticky mechanically.

It’s also, like any complex gesture, not very discoverable. But here’s where Bear tries to help, by… adding even more gestures atop these two. There is a two-finger swipe left or right for jumping back and forward in history…

…and even a two-finger tap to reveal a navigation menu.

That last one feels like overkill to me, but there is something interesting about the app building an entire little universe of compatible gestures – “Come here for all your navigation needs!” – knowing that it increases the chances users will develop a habit of learning and using them. (The gestures also work whether you’re in view or edit mode.)

I am curious, though: Would allowing to tap somewhere near the bottom edge not work as the “obvious” solution to get all the way down?