think differently big

Daedalus Touch: Tools That Do the Unexpected

I was getting ready to post a hint about the nice^[1] iPad editor Daedalus Touch being available for $1.99, when I’ve discovered its dark face.

One of the features I was looking for is Daedalus Touch’s integration with Dropbox. The action is called “Import from Dropbox”. But this import has a dark face: if the files you are importing have a non .txt extension they get deleted and replaced with .txt copies. Which part of an import operation includes renaming files?

I hate tools that are supposed to do one thing and they end up making completely unrelated decisions for me. What could I say more about the cases when they are making the wrong ones.

Multimarkdown Composer: Yet Another Mac Markdown Editor

If you thought we’ve already got enough Markdown editors on Mac, just add another one to your list Multimarkdown Composer. This one comes directly from Fletcher Penney, the guy who extended Markdown into MultiMarkdown. At first glance the app looks like an extended version of TextEdit with support for syntax coloring and auto-generating syntax. And it integrates very well with Marked.

As a user of a custom Markdown/MultiMarkdown syntax, I’m missing the option to configure MultiMarkdown Composer processor. But I hope it will come with a later version.

Multimarkdown Composer is selling at a special release $7.99 price in the App Store.

iA Writer App on Sale

While I’m the very^[1] happy user of Byword, I’ve always been interested to see iA Writer at work after reading some of its reviews.

I have the iPad version of it, but I’m not using it too much, having a different tool set there for editing my Markdown files. Today while browsing through the App Store, I’ve noticed that iA Writer is on sale for $9.99 (from the original $17.99). So if you want to try out this application that got amazing reviews, go give iA Writer a try. I’d be very interested to hear about your experience with it^[2].

Get iA Writer for $9.99.

The Raise of Markdown

The other day after posting about Macchiato, Dean Wampler tweeted:

Amazing the proliferation of Markdown editors for the Mac and/or iOS: Byword, Macchiato, Edito… (I’m using Byword)

The reason for this is quite simple: Markdown sits at the intersection of the two most used and universal mediums: the web and text. Basically its role is to simplify the translation of the universally available text files to the universally readable web.

Textile Extensions in RedCloth

If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably been annoyed by my questions (and complains) about Ruby gem management. The reason of that series of tweets was that I’ve been playing lately with ☞ RedCloth, the Ruby implementation of ☞ Textile markup.

For almost an year I’ve been using ☞ Markdown for writing my posts (and in case you missed it somehow this last year I’ve published over 1300 posts on my NoSQL blog). While I do like Markdown a lot, over time I’ve realized that sometimes Markdown is letting me down by making me write HTML.

Markdown is indeed keeping simple things simple, but fails to make complex things possible. So, I’ve decided to look at Textile.

I liked quite a few things about Textile and I got the impression that it comes closer to the keep simple things simple, make complex things possible philosophy. But as a picky person I’ve also found places where I’d have liked Textile to behave differently.

What followed was:

• a short meeting with my friend ☞ Andrei to help me fix my Ruby setup and learn about the latest Ruby cool things (nb: I haven’t been doing anything Ruby for the last 2-3 years, so I was quite a bit rusty at it)
• a few hacking sessions over the last couple of nights (I love Chrismas, but I’m usually over-eating so I need to burn that somehow)

The result: a set of Textile extensions in RedCloth.

Textile Meta Support

First of the extensions I’ve added is support for meta information. This is a very basic, non breaking change that allows one to include fragments that will carry metadata and that will not be present in the final output.

Here is a simple example:

meta. Texttile Extension in RedCloth
* tags: textile, markdown, markup

Textile List Improvements

By default Textile unordered lists are defined using the * character and ordered lists using # character and ordered lists using # character. I have found these a bit uncommon, so I ended up adding quite a few options.

For unordered lists, you can define them now using either + character (non breaking change ) or - character ( nb: this is a breaking change as the – char was previously used for definition lists. When introducing this change I’ve switched definition lists to use the : char and personally I find that more appropriate… but I agree that I’m too biased)

So, here are some examples:

Unordered list using +:

+ some item
+ another item
++ another item subitem
++ another item subitem
+ last item

results in:

• some item
• another item
  • another item subitem
  • another item subitem
• last item

Unordered list using -:

- some item
- another item
-- another item subitem
-- another item subitem
- last item

results in:

• some item
• another item
  • another item subitem
  • another item subitem
• last item

For ordered lists, I’ve made it possible to define them using numerals (nb: wouldn’t that feel more natural than using #?). Here is a quick example:

1. item 1
  1.1. item 1.1
  2.2. item 1.2
2. item 2
5. item 3

This results in:

1. item 1
   1. item 1.1
   2. item 1.2
2. item 2
3. item 3

Note that while using numerals for defining ordered lists, the numbers do not really count (i.e. even if the last item is prefixed with 5. the list will not use 5)

Textile random attributes

Sometimes I’m finding myself needing to use HTML element attributes. While Markdown doesn’t support this at all, Textile allows one to specify:

• an element id, by including (#element_id)
• an element class, by including (element_class)
• random CSS code, by including {css code}

It also allows one to provide a lang attribute for an HTML element by using [lang]. Now this is exactly the place I’ve hooked my Textile random attributes extensions. Instead of allowing only [lang], one could now write p[width:300 height:200]. to get something like:

<p width="300" height="200">

The way to provide random HTML attributes is:

[attr1:value attr2:value]

Note that an attribute can be present multiple times and the values will be joined to form the final attribute value.

In case you are wondering where would such extension be useful, here are a couple of ideas:

• providing image sizes (nb: images already support the “title” and “alt” attributes and you can provide image dimensions through CSS)
• providing attributes like rel or rev to links

All these extensions are available in my RedCloth GitHub clone in the branch my_4_2_3. The extensions are currently built on top of the RedCloth 4.2.3 release and not the master.

If you want to give it a try please do so. And if you find them useful maybe you could ping the original RedCloth author to include them in the official RedCloth distribution as I’m not convinced I’m the right person to maintain a Ruby library.

Note: Just because I’ve wanted to benefit of all these improvements in Vim too, I’ve also made some changes to the Textile Vim syntax file and I’ll upload that on the GitHub project.

Note: There are a few other limitations of Textile (i.e. cannot include a blockquote in a list, etc.), that I’m not really sure I can address.

Note: The master of my RedCloth clone is now including all the extensions so you can benefit of both the latest fixes in the official RedCloth and the above set of Textile extensions in RedCloth.