BrettTerpstra.com

CriticMarkup was unveiled a little bit ago, and it was intriguing but not immediately useful to me at the time. Since then I’ve been playing with the MultiMarkdown Composer beta (available to owners of version 2), which includes a basic “change tracking” feature supporting full CriticMarkup syntax as you type. I’m sold.

The initial release of CriticMarkup included a preprocessor for Marked 1.5+, but given the uncertain release date of the next incarnation of Marked, I wanted to make it work with the standard custom processor feature of Marked 1.4. A few adjustments to the existing script and one dependency later it’s good to go.

First, go and explore the CriticMarkup syntax. When you have a document marked up and ready to preview, grab the custom processor script and put it anywhere in your user folder or subfolder. This version of the script requires that you have the MultiMarkdown binary (available via brew) installed at /usr/local/bin/multimarkdown. You can, of course, edit the script to use any external processor you like after CriticMarkup has done its thing.

Then, just enter the path to the critic.py script in Marked’s custom processor field under Behavior preferences. If you get the path wrong, the text will turn red to let you know. Enable the custom processor checkbox and hit “Save” at the bottom of that box.

Now, when you load a CriticMarkup document in Marked, you should see three tabs: Markup, Original and Edited. These let you see a view with changes inline, or see the document’s original state and how it looks with all changes accepted.

I really hope to see a time in the future when this system (or something similar) takes off for editorial work. I think it’s an excellent way of tracking changes and edits between two people. Properly used, it could handle quite a few sources of feedback. Combined with a system like Draft, it could kill Word. Someday…

Ok, this will be the last update to Sidecar for a little while (no promises). 1.5 seems like a nice number to hold at while I work on some other projects. I’ve put enough hours into a project with a very limited audience to feel mildly guilty, but I’m having a lot of fun with this. Hey, I respect your life choices.

To catch up newcomers, Sidecar is a theme (jacket) for Simplify, my favorite music controller for Spotify, iTunes, Rdio and most web-based players. Sidecar currently only works on 27” monitors, but that limitation will be lifted on an upcoming version of Simplify¹. Your 11” Air will soon have a new option for decorative music control.

Sidecar 1.5 adds three new variations which feature soft lines, fades and a kind of “dripping” transition as the song progresses. The “Nightfall” one is guaranteed not to match any of your wallpapers, but I like it anyway. Kind of. You have to see it in the right light.

I renamed all of the variations in a manic moment. You’ll just have to live with that. I also added visual notifications on play and pause, and some JavaScript and CSS quirks have been smoothed out.

I restructured the source on Github to make it easy to play with, if you’re interested. Feel free to poke around and offer criticism/improvements.

I was considering adding a feature to Jekyll that would let me provide “.txt” links that return Markdown versions of posts the way that MacDrifter’s Pelican install does and I’m pretty sure Gruber used to. I got bored with the idea of writing a generator for it, so I hacked a workaround that turned into something quite different from the original objective. That happens a lot.

If you look under the little gear icon in the upper right of this site, you’ll now see an “Add to nvALT links” option. Clicking it will turn on “nvALT” links next to “[tweet : adn]” for every post, both on the index pages and on permalinks. Clicking this — assuming you have nvALT installed — will use Marky to generate the Markdown version as an nvALT url that will execute itself automatically and… long story short, it adds a Markdownified version of the post straight to nvALT.

You can, of course, just drag a url to the notes list and hold down Option to run Readability and Markdownify on any article, but I figured I’d make it really easy¹. I made it opt-in on my site, but there are some bookmarklets on the Marky website for doing it anywhere.

It also highlights the fact that Marky can return JSON (with a JSONP wrapper if called with callback=?). This makes it usable in any web application, in addition to the main website and its command line tool (see the API docs on one of the Marky pages). I know it still has some issues, especially with images within links, but it sure can come in handy.

Sidecar 1.4 is up. I really should save these changes up and make larger releases, but this is fun. I’m playing a little more with the controls and color variations, so this does add some fun stuff.

First, there’s a new variation called “Almost invisible.” It’s colorless and will work will on all but dark backgrounds. If you have a colorful desktop picture that doesn’t match any of the existing themes, this one should be perfect.

Next — and this is nifty — you can Command-Click on the jacket to seek to that point in the song. Double-click to skip to the next track. Play/Pause still works on a single click, but it’s a little flaky in Simplify right now. I know for a fact that this will be fixed by the devs pretty soon.

For any interested jacket-hackers: the source is now up on GitHub so you can easily play with it and make pull requests. You will, of course, need Simplify installed.

If you put the index.html and index.css files into into ~/Library/Containers/pixelmates.Simplify/Data/Library/Application Support/Simplify/sidecar/ and run /Applications/Simplify.app/Contents/MacOS/Simplify --watch-jackets, you’ll be able to edit the resulting folder and see live results as you work. Don’t clone the repository directly to that folder, git causes a refresh any time you do anything. Even an ls on the folder. Just copy them out for editing and back into the repo when you want to commit.

Please feel free to play with it, and all pull requests will be considered.