Pear Note 1.2 is now released! There are lots of changes to talk about, but I’ll focus on a few of the highlights here.

 

1. Improved highlighting during playback. Now not only is the character itself highlighted when it was typed, but the entire current word is underlined in blue. This underline stays around, so you always know where in the recording you are.
   

   New highlighting

2. Improved video device support. Pear Note now supports a lot more video cameras, including DV camcorders and many webcams that utilize third-party drivers.
3. High quality video. Pear Note now supports 640×480 video recording.
4. Auto-scrolling. Simply check the auto-scroll box, and the text view will ensure that every time a character is highlighted it is visible by scrolling to make it visible.
5. Playback context buffer. When clicking on text to navigate around a recording, Pear Note no longer starts playing exactly when the character was typed. Instead, Pear Note starts a few seconds before it was typed to give you a bit of context. By default, you’ll jump to 10 seconds earlier, though this is configurable in the playback preferences.

Just wanted to let everyone that’s eagerly awaiting Pear Note 1.2 know that it is coming soon, likely in 2 weeks or so. If you’re not eagerly awaiting it, you should be. Pear Note 1.2 will have a ton of new features that you’ll hopefully enjoy. These will include major improvements to the video system providing higher quality video recording as well as support for a ton of new devices (including DV cameras), auto-scrolling, starting playback from a few seconds before a character was typed when clicking the text, less transient character highlighting during playback, and a number of other features. If you want a taste of it now, you can check out the current betas. Otherwise, stay tuned for all the new goodness.