maybe a year ago, but not today

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

andy lee said:

>    I hadn't thought of it as "immense", 

>    but I often edit Markdown documents 

>    with Jonathan Rentzsch's MarkdownLive 

>    (actually a slightly tweaked fork thereof). 


ok, maybe just maybe the markdown "grapevine"
isn't quite as utterly pathetic as i thought it was...

markdownlive should've been seen as a huge advance.

mostly, though, as far as i could see, it was just ignored.



>    As completely basic as it is


calling it "completely basic" is actually very high praise.
crude and primitive is what it is, if we are being honest.

but it demonstrated the point.   and it is _open-source_...
and done in xcode, if i remember correctly, meaning that
any of you variant people who are brave enough to try to
take on "composer" while you still have a fighting chance
would have a good head-start in programming your app...

really.   i'm serious.   think about it.   before it's too late.



>    As completely basic as it is, I strongly prefer it over 

>    a plain text editor, even one that syntax-highlights.


in other words, this one innovation makes up for
a crude and primitive app, even over other apps
that are full-featured, and even highlight syntax.

(syntax highlighting is a good thing, to be sure,
but pales in comparison to a formatted display.)

put that "one innovation" into a decent text-editor,
and use it for two years, like i have, and you too will
describe the effect as being "immense", just like i do.

it will make markdown viable for the "average" user.

that will greatly enhance the power of the users who
are not currently able to generate .html well, or at all.

and it will ease the grunt work of the users who do...

and both those developments will end up being huge.



>    MarsEdit's live preview is pretty huge too.


oh crap.   i always write these posts off the top of my head,
and i completely forgot about marsedit.   sorry about that...

i already had 6 developments, which was probably enough,
quantity-wise, but i _definitely_ shoulda mentioned jalkut,
since i believe he did the work of removing a dependency,
which in turn gave multimarkdown _much_ greater viability.
so that was a significant omission on my part; sorry, daniel.

anyway, big ups to andy lee for fleshing out the full history!

-bowerbird
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