Recently, I’ve begun to use MarkDown as a way to speed up my writing and make better use of distraction free tools.
If you don’t know what MarkDown is, it’s John Gruber’s attempt to make an easy to read, fast to write markup language that can be used to quickly produce documents for the internet. It’s great for blogging, for instance. Check out the link above to get a feel for it – it’s sort of an easier and limited html.
MarkDown editors, mostly glorified text editors, are all the rage on the Mac App Store and in other places, but is there one for PowerPC? Initially, I thought not. That led me to the attempt to create my own. I do have a very rough beta in process, as you can see from the screenshot below. I mocked it up in RealBasic 2009, which leaves a lot to be desired. If there is interest, I will touch it up some more and offer a beta version from this site.
Luckily, my web search pointed me to Notational Velocity. If you have seen this app before, there is an older version that is available for PowerPC, and it’s pretty intriguing in its own right if you need a decently polished note taker and organizer. It has not been updated for a while however – enter nvALT, the spiritual and ancestral successor to Notational Velocity. It adds features and moves this quirky note taker into the future. Best of all, it adds MarkDown support. Awesome!
Here’s the bad news – the newer builds are not PowerPC compatible. I am going to offer my help to see if I can help them create more compatible builds, but in the meanwhile, you will need to stick to Version 2.0. MarkDown support is included though. You can download 2.0 from here. Ignore the offer to upgrade – 2.1 and up do not work on PPC as far as I can tell.
Look for more updates to the site in the coming days.
Note: Our RSS feed is hopelessly out of date. I had a manual process in place to up date it, but it’s pretty bad. For now, I am going to take it down until I can get it fully updated.
— Nathan