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SimpleMark Version 1.3 Now Available

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Welcome to Version 1.3 of SimpleMarkPPC, the world’s “PowerPC only” MarkDown app for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

Version 1.3 makes significant changes to the app. After years of being frustrated with the AutoSave feature, which worked but produced occasional bizarre bugs like missing letters as you typed, I removed it completely. Now, each time you hit save, which you should do frequently if you want to protect your work, the MarkDown preview displays on the right.

In addition, the app will now open and save to .TXT and .MD files from the get go. I can add future filename extensions of choice easily.

This app is dead simple. You can adjust your font preferences in the Preferences window. It runs your text through an older version of multimarkdown (which can be found in the Resources folder within the app bundle if you want to mess around with it). You can still export to a variety of different file options and print a rather rough but serviceable Markdown copy to a printer if you want.

This app is serviceable. Newer Markdown apps out there do a lot more cool stuff, and I keep wondering if I could get one of them to run someday. In the meanwhile, this could work if you need to mess around with MarkDown files on your G4 or G5.

Download it now.

Remember, it’s still beta software, partly because I am relying on a 2009 version of Real Basic that has all kinds of quirks and also because I am sure there are other strange bugs that will crop up. Give me feedback.

— Nathan

Say hello to SimpleMarkPPC

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A couple of days ago, I was whining. I was trying to mock up a MarkDown app for PowerPC machines, and I kept running into stupid, silly bugs. I thought the story was over.

Then I woke up the next day with a fresh insight and perspective to these nagging bugs, and I found a way forward.

Today, I introduce to you the “alpha” release of SimpleMarkPPC (download).

a better icon for SimpleMarkPPC

SimpleMarkPPC is a very simple MarkDown editor for Power Macs. Essentially, it’s just a wrapper for the wonderful multimarkdown command line utility. You can create and load text files, mark them up with the elegant and responsive MarkDown code, and export them to html, LaTeX, or RTF. Though it may seem simple, MarkDown is actually quite complex and capable of a lot of cool stuff. Best of all, you don’t have to use brew to install multimarkdown yourself – I’ve embedded a compiled copy which should work on most Power Macs.

The app updates what you type on the fly by converting it from MarkDown into html, giving you a live preview of how your finished product might look. The conversion is darn good, although it is free of CSS. I’ve kept the app down to the bare bones and will work on polishing the user interface some more in the future.

I hope this is useful to you. It will remain free.

Here’s a tentative road map of what I will tackle next as I sharpen the program:

  • Reduce writes. Right now, to produce the live preview, the text and html files are saved to the disk every few seconds. I’ll find some ways to thrash the hard drive a little less.
  • Print. Got to add some printing capabilities.
  • Support for window resizing/full screen.
  • Font and window transparency options.
  • Making sure I am free software license compliant.
  • Get a better icon.

Please, please, please give it a whirl. Right now, it has been tested on my Power Mac G5 and my Mac Mini G4 in 10.5.8. What about a machine running Tiger? What about a G3 or older G4 Mac? I’d love your feedback.

— Nathan