Marked QL, my new Markdown Quick Look previewer, has met a warm reception, and I wanted to update everyone on a couple of things.
First off, yes, I increased the price of Marked QL from $4.99 to $9.99. I did this in anticipation of a new version of Marked QL that will increase its functionality, but then my update got rejected by Apple. I decided to leave the price there and see how it does, and hope that the update will be out in the next couple of days.
The goal of the price increase would be to have less customer support and more invested customers. It will likely mean a drop in sales, but fewer support requests while I work through the initial releases. It’s an experiment. I still haven’t raised the price of Marked 3 from its “intro” price, and I’ll offer a little more notice if/when that time comes.
The biggest issue that I’ve seen is that I originally only read the UTIs net.daringfireball.markdown and public.text. Unfortunately (for me, especially), a bunch of apps write their own custom UTIs for Markdown files, such as net.ia.markdown if you’ve run iA Writer, or worse unknown.markdown if you’ve ever run TeXShop. I’ve added as many of these UTIs as I can for the next update. I was really hoping that update would be out by now, as the bug is causing more refunds than I would like.
Marked QL really does work with any Markdown file, but on a lot of systems Markdown files get “owned” by apps that change the UTI.
The next version of Marked QL (submitted for review) will add dark mode, Table of Contents navigation, (limited) Quarto processing based on the latest updates to Apex, and will solve a host of issues like those mentioned above. The nice thing about Marked QL being based on Apex is that I’m getting a lot of feedback on Apex itself, which in turn improves the open source technology behind Marked QL.
The next update after that will add font size support from config and a few other new features. That update is still in progress.
I’m hoping to turn Marked QL users into Marked 3 users, but Apple won’t let me include the “Get Marked 3” button I had there initially, so I’ve been relegated to just having a Help menu item for it. That’s fine, I don’t care. It’s not against the rules to have a link, but it’s against the rules to use the lsopen command I was using to either open in Marked 3 or link to get it.
I’d appreciate help getting the word out about Marked QL (and Marked 3) for that matter. So if you say something nice and link to https://markedapp.com/ql on X and tag @markedapp, or post on Mastodon and tag @markedapp@indieapps.space, I’ll enter you in a drawing for a free copy of Marked QL (which you can give to a friend if you already own it).
If you want to share about it on your blog and would like a review copy, just contact me
If you share about it on other social media, send me a link and I’ll enter you as well! I have plenty of copies to give away, so you have a decent chance of scoring one.
Check out Marked QL at markedapp.com/ql.
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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