Introducing Gather, a Cocoa Markdownifier
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
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. ↩
this is cool i could imagine this being a linchpin of something or other. i am confident you have have grand designs.
Can’t wait to see what you come up with! If marked is any indicator of what you can do with a simple and practical idead then I’m sold!
Best of luck!
Like already! Excited to see how this develops. Many thanks.
This is going to be very useful. Looking forward to the finished product. Gave it a couple of quick tries (including your site) and it is fast and, so far, accurate. I like the use of referenced links rather than embedded links.
Thanks so much for all the awesome tools. I’ve been reformatting several large sites using markdown and Marked. This will make it so much easier to pull in the old content for editing and cleanup. You rock!
So now we have to choose between nvALT vs Marky vs read2text vs Gather, and in the case of Marky whether we’re feeling Sarah Palin folksy or like F-bombs today.
I’m pretty excited to hear about that extensive roadmap though… Seriously html2text, who uses
* * *for HRs.Brett love the application. This is what I have spent ages looking for. One small question/request. Could the app possibly be used on locally saved HTML files? I have managed to extract from Evernote all my “Liked” Instapaper articles, but ultimately want to convert them to Markdown…
You can already do this — you only have to use the correct file URL like ’file://localhost/Users/pattulus/Desktop/testsite.html’
Applications like Path Finder or TotalFinder have this feature implemented, but you can setup your own script/service or whatever pretty easily: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091122183451908
Brett, I love this new app. Well done !
Brett, excellent first release. I can’t imagine what the final version would be like. Meanwhile, I am already using it. Though the current version seems to have problems with images, at least from Wikipedia. I’m solving that problem by running the following sed right after Gather.
sed “s://[a-z][a-z]\.wikipedia\.org::” file.mmd > new-file.mmd