If you’re still looking for a slick Markdown editor for iOS, there’s a new candidate up for your vote. WriteUp is a polished editor that covers the basics well. With Dropbox support and available as a universal app for both iPad and iPhone, it makes a nice addition to your all-around writing workflow.
WriteUp comes with a few color styles (including Solarized light and dark), which work well in its full-screen editing mode. Some of the colors clash a little with the default chrome of the app, so I do wish that the brown menubars and such changed with the editor style, but the options are great to have. You can control the font and font size as well.
One very nice feature that just showed up in the latest release is versioning. You can time travel between revisions of your piece and restore a version from any point in its history. You get a full preview of the text of the document in the versions window (available from the box/arrow icon), and it’s easy to traverse.
Dropbox support is a must these days, and WriteUp supports subfolders for organization. You can show multi-line previews in the document list, and subfolders have indicators to show how many documents they contain.
You can export or email both text and HTML versions just by swiping the document in the left-hand list. My workflow generally involves post-processing a document, so exporting text is ideal for me. Being able to email HTML, though, is also a requirement as it allows me to generate better-looking emails than the default email client can.
The auxiliary keyboard above the normal keys offers hashmarks (for headlines), asterisk (for bullet lists), hyphens, underscores and square brackets. There’s also a tab key for quick indentation. Notably, it’s missing parentheses, which would be quite helpful, but the basic tools of Markdown writing are available without having to go to a nested keyboard layout.
Overall, WriteUp is a great editor. It exists in a growing field with a lot of competition, so I’m hoping that new features are consistently added to help differentiate it from the competition. WriteUp is $3.99 on the App Store.
