I wrote something a couple of nights ago that I thought I’d share. I’m calling it “Gather,” and it’s basically an “appified” version of my Readability/Markdownify work. A Cocoa version of Marky the Markdownifier, if you will. You can paste in a URL and it will attempt to find the core text of the page, download it and turn it into Markdown for clean web clipping. It displays the result in a field you can copy from, and it can optionally auto-copy the result to your clipboard.

It’s a little shaky, especially on sites with bad markup. I’d say that right now it has about a 60% success rate. As I have time to work on it I’ll be improving this and adding a bevy of features that may eventually become an App Store submission. We’ll see. This proof-of-concept version1, however, is free to download. I’ll ask nicely that you please not steal the idea and beat me to the punch.

This build is Lion-only; it won’t run at all on Snow Leopard. I’m not really taking any feature suggestions right now, as I already have an extensive roadmap for it that will turn it into something highly useful in many situations (and I’m quite aware of what it lacks in this state). I would enjoy hearing from you with your reactions, though.

Credit due

This version uses GGReadability by Curtis Hard. You should definitely check out his work-in-progress app, Caffeinated. It’s an RSS reader with Google Reader support and some serious potential. I’m also using HTML2Text for “markdownifying.”

Enjoy.

Download

Gather v0.1

Turn web pages into clean Markdown for clipping.

Published 02/06/12.

Updated 02/06/12. Changelog

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  1. I know the icon is pretty terrible. I liked my first version when it was in Photoshop, but it looked horrible in the Dock. It’ll get better.