Marked 2 - the excellent MarkDown Preview app is released, outside of the app store..

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I think you know how much I love MarkDown by now, I always use MarkDown when writing anything, it’s so easy to format text, and it uses the Plain Text[1] format, so it is compatible with any device, any computer.

I often write MarkDown[2] in apps like NValt, ByWord and MarsEdit, and one thing that you want is a good preview of your formatted text, and I have been using the app Marked to preview what I write, it’s an app you can install from the Mac App Store, and it can preview what you write in a lot of different apps. And if the app is not supported, you can just drag and drop a file on it’s icon and it gets previewed.

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Now the great MarkDown guy Brett Terpstra has updated it to version 2. With a lot of new cool features. Watching a specific folder on your computer for example, it even supports nested folders. That means that you can have a preview of the latest changed file in a folder completely automatically.

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Marked 2 not only previews your formatted plain text, it can also give you a lot of different statistics, like how often you have used a specific keyword for example.

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I haven’t bought Marked 2 yet (because it’s quite expensive), but it is currently only available outside of the App Store, and it costs $US 11.99 and there is no upgrade price from the App Store version of Marked.

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The first version, Marked will still be available as a light version in Mac App Store.
I am not sure of the reasons why Brett Terpstra is not releasing Marked 2 in the App Store, but it probably has something to do with Apple’s “sandboxing” of apps…

You can try Marked 2 for free as a 7 day trial.

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Here is some of Marked 2 new features:

  • MultiMarkdown 4.2 built in, including inline footnotes

  • Alternative “Discount” parser built in

  • New and improved search features

    • case sensitive option
    • whole word option
    • regular expressions
    • CSS selector searching

  • Fountain support

  • CriticMarkup support

  • Keyword highlighting

    • Live highlighting of common/overused phrases using the Plain English Campaign guides
    • regex/wildcard search for keyword/phrase highlighting
    • Keyword drawer with counter to easily add temporary keywords for highlighting and viewing keyword density

  • Advanced document statistics with reading time and readability indexes

  • HTML preview improvements

    • Detect images in Markdown and HTML and watch for changes
    • Detect php include(‘file’)s and watch for changes
    • Detect JS and CSS in HTML files and add them to the watch list

  • More ways to incorporate Marked into your workflow

    • MarsEdit preview
    • VoodooPad preview of current page
    • Preview clipboard
    • Watch any folder (including nested) and preview the most recently changed file within it

  • Custom processor, pre-processor and additional arguments fields

  • Export palette

  • Export additional document types

    • export DOC, DOCX or ODT
    • Export RTF, or RTFD to include images
    • Paginated PDF export option

  • Embed images (base64) in exported HTML documents for easy portability

  • Collapse/expand sections by headlines for fast navigation

  • Moar keyboard navigation

  1. Files that contain markup or other meta-data are generally considered plain-text, as long as the entirety remains in directly human-readable form, as in HTML, XML, and so on. The use of plain-text rather than bit-streams to express markup, enables files to survive much better “in the wild”, in part by making them largely immune to computer architecture incompatibilities.  ↩

  2. Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people “to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”. See more posts tagged MarkDown.  ↩


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