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Marked 1.3.2 in review

Brett — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:48:59 +0000

Marked v1.3.2 has been uploaded and is waiting for review. This release, despite being an incremental version number, has some exciting new features. Here’s a preview of the changelog:

Fixed

More careful when stripping javascript from the document
More responsive to a wider range of files/locations (Lion-only)
Moved TOC to toolbar button
Increased file size limit, offers a warning on large files

New

Save/Copy as RTF
Word count for selection
Word repetition visualization
Readability Statistics
Keyboard navigation
- help hud (press “h” in preview) for navigation keyboard shortcuts
Option to disable SmartyPants typography extension
Updated multimarkdown executable to development version
- Better handling of HTML5 elements
- Fix for bold/emphasis handling in complex blocks

The new location of the Table of Contents avoids a lot of overlap concerns. When there are headers (h2-h6) in the document, a button will appear next to the gear menu (to the left) and clicking it will slide up a list of those headers. Clicking a header in the list will navigate the document to that header and temporarily highlight it.

The increased file size limit will allow massive text files to be loaded, presenting a warning about decreased performance one time.

Save/Copy as RTF should be handy for people composing emails and other documents in Marked. It will maintain most aspects of the current custom style when creating the Rich Text version. The Copy as RTF has a little trouble with blockquotes right now, and I’m not sure I can do much about it, but beyond that it’s a quick way to get your preview into another document.

Word count for selection is pretty darn nifty: when you make a selection with the mouse, a small popup at the mouse cursor location will tell you the word and character count for just the selected text.

Word repetition visualization allows you to see words repeated by paragraph or across the entire document. You can click on a bolded (repeated) word and dim everything else so that it’s easy to see where the repetitions are located. It uses a stemming algorithm so that various forms of the same word are dectected, including plurals and conjugations.

The keyboard navigation is fairly extensive, with home-key controls for scrolling, the ability to use up to nine numeric bookmarks for rapid return, navigation by header and more. Pressing “h” in the preview will show all available shortcuts.

Fletcher Penney has been really great about providing some updates to the MultiMarkdown processor to handle a few edge cases. People who’ve experienced rendering anomolies should be quite satisfied!

Readability statistics are experimental, but Marked attempts to provide a grade level and Fog Index for your document.

There are a few new options in Preferences to cover some more requests for control over the preview and rendering. I’ve also updated the help system and added a Markdown reference you can keep open while working.

It’s a big release with a little version number… I’ll update the Marked website and post here as soon as it’s approved. Special thanks to the beta testers and their great feedback on this version. Also, if you buy Marked now, all of these features will be yours for free when the update comes out!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Marked 1.3.2 in review

Catching Markdown mistakes

Brett — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:58:39 +0000

I had an interesting idea this morning. At least I find it interesting, but I haven’t slept much lately. Either way, here it is: in Markdown, if you misname a reference link, forget to fill one in or have a malformed URL, your broken Markdown shows up in your output. Wouldn’t it be nice if your preview highlighted those for you before you went to publish?

Marked 1.3, which is coming along very nicely, has a few JavaScripts built in to the preview (which can be turned off in preferences). It provides a table of contents based on headers in your document, smooth scrolling, tool tips to show you where external links will go and, as of this morning, highlighting of broken links.

The code is simple. This version is jQuery, just because that was convenient, but you can pull this off in plain old JavaScript with barely any extra code:

// Scan for and highlight malformed/incomplete Markdown links
$('#wrapper').html($('#wrapper').html().replace(/(\[.*?\][\[\(].*?[\]\)])/g,
"\"color:rgba(152, 50, 63, 1)\">$1"));

It just scans for Markdown-style links ([text][title] or [text](link)) that are still in your text after converting to HTML. If it finds them, it highlights them in red. Just thought I’d share.

By the way, in addition to the JavaScript fun, the next version of Marked has multiple custom styles (unlimited), can open any text file with any extension, can load MathJax for MathML rendering and much more. I’ll keep you posted on its release, but it should be soon.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Catching Markdown mistakes

Sticking with what I know

Brett — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:15:27 +0000

I’ve been wanting to write more here, and seriously considering what I want to write about. Obviously, I should stick with what I know. What do I know best? Apps.

When it comes to Mac and iOS apps, I try just about everything. I know my way around more apps than I can name; apps I’ll never use, apps I thought were terrible, apps I use every day… whether I like them or not, I explore just about everything I can find. This gives me a great point of comparison when looking at any app, and I think my reviews are well-informed and fair. I know what I like, I know what sells, and I know that the two aren’t always the same thing.

This being the case, I’m going to start writing app reviews here. If developers out there want to send me new apps, I’ll gladly tell them what I think. However, I don’t plan to stick to the new and shiny; I also want to spread the word about some gems that I use regularly but which may not be in the spotlight at the moment.

Yes, I still write app reviews for TUAW, and will likely continue to do so. In the last year, though, I accepted a salaried position with AOL. This has meant two things: first, my schedule is packed during the day, which is when important news tends to happen. Second, I don’t get paid to write for TUAW anymore. The result is that my rate of posting on TUAW has slowed tremendously (from an already somewhat pathetic pace). Writing at a relaxed pace for my own blog makes sense at this point. If something is relevant enough, I’ll write it up on TUAW and link it from here.

I’m hoping doing app reviews here will get me into blogging about things other than my personal projects. I’m not going to slow down on that; if I do something I think would be of interest, I’m going to write it up like I always do. That’s second nature, I just want to add on to that.

If you’re a dev who wants to send me previews or betas, feel free to contact me. I’ll take a look at anything for Mac, iPad or iPhone. I’m not interested in anyone paying for reviews, and not interested in any gifts post-review.

I also tend to pass on writing about things I really dislike. If an app isn’t ready for primetime, I prefer to give it time to mature rather writing negative reviews. If I don’t like something, why would waste time criticizing it? That being said, if I think something is a really great idea but lacking in execution, or, conversely, a really great execution with an unsatisfactory core concept, I’ll write a critique that will hopefully result in improvements, not just negative press.

Hopefully you’ll find all of this enlightening and intriguing. It will help me get some things out of my system, too, so it should be good for both of us!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Sticking with what I know

nvALT 2.1 progress report

Brett — Fri, 20 May 2011 05:52:00 +0000

Development on the next version of nvALT is going more slowly than I’d like, but some very cool changes are happening. In addition to implementing the latest changes and fixes from the main branch of Notational Velocity, I’ve also worked in a few new features and a small bucket of fixes.

Usability fixes: I’m waiting for input from elasticthreads on this one, but for now I’m removing the hold-control-for-temporary-preview feature. It’s baffling for people who like to use Cocoa’s Emacs emulation when typing. Understandable, especially since it was undocumented.; I’m still working on a fix for the Spaces behavior, but that’s definitely a bug that will be squashed before the 2.1 release.; I’ve updated the External Editor feature to use scrod’s ODBEditor solution. Yes, this one consistently provides TextMate as an editing option.
MultiMarkdown 3: While I haven’t implemented the fully live preview that Fletcher is hoping I will, I have made nvALT compatible with MultiMarkdown 3, if you have it installed. It’s fast. nvALT will also check for metadata headers in your note, and if they exist it will export the straight MMD-rendered document (no custom CSS¹).
Tag Sync: Totally not my doing. Darryl H. Thomas has been hard at work revamping the Simplenote sync and adding Tag Syncing to NV. I’ve incorporated his changes for testing, and things are looking really good.
Preview Window: The preview window is no longer a HUD, but rather a utility panel. This change was needed to add some additional features:

Lock the preview on a note so you can edit other notes and use it as a reference
Print the preview. This can easily be used to save rendered Markdown as a PDF
Icons for all features beyond the View Source button

Display preferences: You can now remove the grid lines and/or add alternating row colors to the notes list. It’s still one color across the whole window, but I may change it to allow a separate edit field color before release.

There’s more, but my primary goal for the next week is to work with scrod to implement all of the things he’s already fixed and bring nvALT up to parity with the trunk. It’ll be worth it. The source is back up on GitHub now, so if you want to see any of these changes in action (and have Developer Tools installed), feel free. Pull requests are welcome as well.

This is because MMD 3 doesn’t have any override for “snippet” vs. “complete.” If you add headers, you’re getting a complete document. So… nvALT simply detects that and avoids outputting an HTML document with an tag inside of the . It’s not beautiful, but it’s the only sensible solution I’ve found thus far. ↩

No related posts.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at nvALT 2.1 progress report

nvALT 2.0: it’s here

Brett — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:09:09 +0000

The long-promised 2.0 (yeah, I skipped 1.0.8) is finally here. Please download it here, as the application filename has changed to “nvALT” and Check for Updates won’t work properly. It also uses its own preference files and database now, so you’ll have to rebuild your preferences when you first launch it.

This version is no longer my own project. I’ve teamed up with ElasticThreads, and nvALT 2.0 would not have happened without him. I got too busy for a while to update with all of the sweet changes that Scrod made to the original Notational Velocity, and things were looking a little grim for a release any time soon. ElasticThreads picked up my fork, incorporated most of my changes with his own and applied them to version b4 of the trunk, effectively rescuing me and creating a spectacular release at the same time.

Scrod already brought great changes like [[note linking]], improved widescreen view and automatic list bullet creation, among a dozen other new features. The following is a list of highlights in nvALT 2.0. See the project page for a complete list of new features.

Textile and (Multi)Markdown support with Preview window (hold down Control to view temporarily)
HTML source code tab in the Preview window for fast copy/paste to blogs, etc.
Customizable HTML and CSS files for the Preview window
Custom HTML/CSS templates can be included in saved output from the Preview
Unique interface design changes
Social note sharing via Peggd
Convert imported URLs to Markdown, and optionally strip excess content with Readability
Multi-note tagging with autocompletion
Full-screen mode
Optional menubar and menubar-only modes
Color schemes
Improved readability with optional width limit and margins
Really cool scrollbars
Word Count (hold down Option to view temporarily)
Open note in 3rd party text editor (also part of NV, now)

I’ll post a roadmap soon, after David and I have a little more time to agree on the next steps. In the meantime, enjoy the new release! Source code will be available soon, and I’ll post the link on the project page once it’s updated.

As always, thanks to Scrod (aka Zachary Schneirov), Christian Tietze, and others whose work is a part of this version.

Note: Apparently our build is not particularly PowerPC compatible. Since we don’t have PPC machines to test on, it’s difficult to provide compatibility for them. We’ll do our best, but in the meantime its probably best for PPC users to hold off or use this experimentally only.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at nvALT 2.0: it’s here

Downtime apology and upcoming projects

Brett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:55:59 +0000

I apologize for the recent downtime, which also affected the Clippable bookmarklet’s ability to work. Dreamhost has been pretty awful with downtime lately, and my attempt to switch to a different physical server resulted in a horrible mess for myself and several clients. I have to say that Dreamhost support was extremely helpful in repairing the situation… their support is the main reason I’ve stuck with them through the 4 hours of downtime I’d had up to that point. I’m not sure I’ll be able to swallow much more, but we’ll see if things run as smoothly as they’ve promised from here on out.

In other news, I have a new version of the Songza service–one that doesn’t require any additional libraries–which I’ll post soon. A couple of other little projects are in the works, including a service that interprets natural language dates for various purposes. I’m in Atlanta for a week, then I’ll be in San Francisco covering Macworld for TUAW, so it may be a bit, but I’ll be back!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Downtime apology and upcoming projects