While driving to work yesterday, I was listening to the Mac Power User podcast episode (put number here). David and Katie had Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog as their guest. The topic was text editors. If you blog or write on a regular basis, I recommend listening to this episode. Among the many things they discussed, was the text editor Byword and the Markdown preview tool, Marked written by Brett himself. I downloaded both of them last night from the Mac App store. My first impression of Byword is “Wow!” It is a beautiful editor that is both simple and extremely friendly and helpful for writers who like to use Markdown for marking up a document for posting to a blog. When using Byword in full screen mode, it is a clean, distraction-free experience that lets you focus simply on writing. Hopefully after I have had the opportunity to use it more, I will write a full review.
Marked is a Markdown preview tool that lets you drag a text document to the Marked icon and preview what your document will look like when rendered. It is a flexible and versatile tool for making sure your Markdown tags are correct and looking like you intend them too.
I am still searching for an editor, plug-in, etc. that will let me write a blog post and directly post/send to my blog. Currently I am using Mars Edit as my conduit. I love Mars Edit, but I still wish there was a way to eliminate a step from the workflow. I’ll keep searching – I need a Sacajawea to help me!