Well, my “secret” project is up and out: Marked was approved by Apple today for sale in the Mac App Store. It’s a Markdown previewer which can watch any text file for changes, updating the HTML preview whenever you save it. It adds Markdown preview to any text editor.
Marked has four built-in styles to suit most tastes, but you can also create your own custom CSS and tell Marked where to find it. Just export a document with lots of markup in it with the CSS embedded (check the box at the bottom of the Save dialog) and you’ll have a full structure to work with.
Marked can also print and print to PDF, and it maintains styling (without backgrounds) so you get professional, finished documents from your Markdown. As mentioned above, it also exports to HTML, with or without the preview styles. You can copy the HTML source as a snippet from your current document with a keystroke at any time (Command-Shift-C).
Marked’s preview panel can be “floated,” keeping it above all other application windows. You can also set a transparency level on it and have it become translucent when it’s not the foreground application.
There are document statistics, too, so if your text editor doesn’t have line, word and character counts, Marked has you covered. The word count is in the bottom bar of the window (you can hide it in preferences, if you want) and clicking it will give you a popup with other statistics.
I’m excited to have pulled this off. It’s not a huge application and it’s a really simple idea, but I got some good Objective-C experience and am proud of the result. Hopefully it will sell a few copies, too…
Check it out on the Mac App Store!
