Byword 2

Out of the blue popped Byword 2 for both iOS and Mac OS X last week. The short review is: 1. Free update for previous owners! 2. $4.99 unlocks a publishing mode!

Byword 2 largely appears the same as its predecessors; there’s not a brand new ribbon interface to be seen, happily. It remains a simple tool with a focus on writing, with a minimal interface and feature set. The marquee feature for this update is the publishing mode, and it’s a good reason to update if you tend to prefer writing in Byword (or another app of its ilk) but have a kludgier means of posting.

My eyes lit up when I saw Tumblr support, because it has been a long road to get to a writing workflow I really liked. Tumblr, like most blogging platforms*, affords the user web entry as a means to post. You can paste in Markdown or HTML and submit from the page. Alternatively, you can use an application like Mars Edit.

My path to posting was to use Mark Wunsch’s tumblr command-line tool for Tumblr’s API (it was the tumblr-rb gem back in those days). It could be integrated into TextMate, if you were so inclined, or used at the Terminal to post a markdown file. It was exactly the way I wanted to work: using a text editor with syntax highlighting to create drafts in markdown, and then post when ready. You could even create a bundle with a hotkey to post right from TextMate.

TextMate Bundle for the tumblr gem

I had some handy TextExpander snippets to smooth the process. It worked a good portion of the time, but it often failed, such that it was a point of friction. I often had to save my .md file and then fire this snippet…

tumblr --credentials ~/.tumblrlogin

…from TextExpander at the command line, and then drag the file into the Terminal window at the end of the line. This worked, too, and I preferred it to pasting into a Tumblr window, but only sometimes; often enough, the command threw an error, which I believe was eventually due to version two of Tumblr’s API coming out.

I happened to install the new version of the tumblr gem the night before Byword 2 came out. I was working on understanding the syntax when I called it a night, and then today at work — boom — there was Byword 2. I was quick to purchase the publishing upgrade for both the iOS and Mac versions. I think I’ll still fiddle with the TextMate workflow, but Byword looks to make my life a bit simpler.

One of the things afforded me by using Markdown files in a text editor, and publishing using the tumblr gem, was the use of YAML front matter in my posts. YAML looks like this:

title: Witty Riposte
state: published,draft,submission,queue
format: markdown
tags: tech
slug: witt-riposte

I fire this off with a TextExander snippet so I don’t have to rely on file templates or long-term memory. Especially useful is the “state” field; you can tell Tumblr to publish your post right away, save it as a draft, put it in the queue, or do whatever it does with a submission. Designating a post as a “draft” makes searching for drafts a snap; I have a smart folder that reveals only files with “state: draft” in the body from my Tumblr posts folder, and another shell command that I fire off from TextExpander:

grep -r "state: draft" ~/Dropbox/Tumblr*

You don’t get that kind of flexibility switching to iCloud for file management, though.

But true to form, Byword 2’s publishing feature is drop-dead simple. You enter your platform’s login information into a preferences screen and you’re all set to publish. Specific to Tumblr, you can tag posts and create a slug.

I think the only thing I’ll miss about writing in TextMate is syntax highlighting; I always though that looked really good. Byword does a bit of this with html (in grey), titles (in bold), and of course with bold and italicized text. But it’s a world of grays in Byword.

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* you can argue that tumblr isn’t a blogging platform or its more than that or whatever, but it works fine for many writers’ purposes.