Today my favorite Markdown editor, Byword for iOS and Mac, was updated to version 2.0. The developers have included sandboxing, a way to keep the preview at the same position you in you were editing the document, the ability to copy rich text to the clipboard, and, of course, lots of bug fixes and other improvements. But by far the most important upgrade here is publishing, which allows you to write a blog post and instantly send it to Blogger, Evernote, Scriptogram, Tumblr, or WordPress.
I’m using this feature right now to send this review to Papermail and I’ll be using it later today to copy the Markdown from my Day One entry and publish it on The Paperjournals. It’s going to be very handy for my daily activities and I’m pleased to see that the developers have finally taken the initiative to allow authors to further connect with their digital workspaces easily.
While I do enjoy the publishing feature a lot, it isn’t a free upgrade. After you’ve already purchased the Mac app at $9.99 — or managed to catch it on sale at half price — you’ll have to make an in-app purchase of $4.99 for the blogging feature. Seeing as developers aren’t able to simply charge for a new version, this is a good middle ground. Some users may be unhappy to see in-app purchases in, of all things, a writing app, but when a developer spends a lot of time on sandboxing and other fixes, it’s nice to make something off of it. After all, it’s hard to get consistent traffic on an app after many people already use it.
I really enjoy this new version of Byword. The only thing that stuck out to me when writing this review was the font, which doesn’t look the same as the Cochin 17pt did in the previous version. It’s more fuller — bold, in a way. I don’t know exactly what the designers did here, but it did take a while for me to get used to.
As for publishing, while I do find it very useful, I just noticed something: it doesn't support images. If you simply drag and drop one from your desktop, it's imported as a local image and will not be uploaded. You'll need to use FTP or your blog's backend to upload an image, which makes things complicated if you use them pervasively (which I don't). One other missing thing in the publishing function is a list of categories. Unless you've memorized your categories, you may have a hard time choosing which one to include the blog post in since it doesn't have a drop-down menu for you, but instead a simple text field.
It'd also be cool to see some sort of editing feature for the times I make a mistake and don't want to visit WordPress or Tumblr.
Other than that, I love what I’m able to do with Byword now. The app makes it a few clicks less for me to write something, and that’s the important thing.