Byword — my favorite Markdown-ready text editor for iOS and OS X — received a huge update today.
In addition to better Dropbox syncing (yay, offline!) and a tweaked UI on iOS, Byword 2.0 brings a huge feature: publishing.
Enabled by a $4.99 in-app purchase, Byword can now publish WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and Scriptogram blogs and Evernote notebooks.
The WordPress support is the most helpful to me, as 512 runs on it. Currently, custom fields can’t be saved for re-use. I created a TextExpander snippet to drop linked_list_url= in place for now, but the developers say that better support for this sort of thing is coming in a future build. While I didn’t ask about in beta — I’m a terrible beta user — caching of categories and tags would be helpful as well.
Unlike my current setup, Byword pushes HTML to my server, not Markdown, and does it on the fly, eliminating the need for a plugin to do the heavy lifting.
My only other complaint is equally minor — once you enter the “Publish” screen, you have to publish or cancel, and the latter doesn’t save the settings. The idea here is to stay in your “writing environment” until you’re ready to go, then publish.
This doesn’t resonate with the way I work, sadly. I like MarsEdit’s approach of putting the content and most of the publishing data on the same playing field.
All of this isn’t to say that Byword’s new features are bad. In fact, overall, it’s a great addition to an already-solid app. In fact, I wrote this piece in it:
All in all, if you use Byword now, this update only makes it better. If you aren’t using the app, now’s the time to check it out.