Marked 2 launched

Marked 2 has officially launched. There’s a lot to love about the new version, but let me start by clearing up any confusion.

Marked 2 is currently only available outside of the App Store. It costs $US 11.99 and there is no upgrade price from the App Store version of Marked. The App Store version is very solid, and from here will serve as a “light” version for people who don’t want to drop $12. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I can’t add that copy to the App Store description, but I don’t feel that leaving Marked 1 up for a while is going to cause anyone undue harm, and I’ll be providing fixes as needed (though it hasn’t needed many for a while now).

You can try Marked 2 for free (seven day trial) and see if it’s worth the $12 price to you. If not, you can still grab the original Marked and receive full support for it.

The decision to go outside the App Store was a difficult one, and I’ve definitely had second thoughts. I now plan to have an App Store version of Marked 2 (at the same price) in addition to the current one¹, but I need to work around a couple of sandboxing roadblocks first. That’s on my plate right next to a spoonful of time off.

The new stuff

Anyway, on to Marked 2. This version includes a rewrite of the file watching system which speeds up response times. Quite a bit in some circumstances. Just about every part of the app is faster, actually. The JavaScript-based features are rewritten and optimized, and even the scroll-to-edit feature is over 10x faster at processing version differences on long documents.

In addition to Scrivener support, Marked 2 supports everything from clipboard previews (hit Command-Shift-V) to MarsEdit blog posts (under the Preview menu). VoodooPad is supported, too. It has a fast search (with regular expression options), a keyword highlighting feature for finding overused phrases, keyword density and much more.

Here’s the basic “new feature” list:

• 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 (including “scrippets”)
• 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

For a detailed list of Marked 2 features, you can visit the online documentation and use the search feature to find anything specific you’re looking for. You can also quickly filter through the documentation using the Full Index, which lists all headers and subheaders in the documentation and allows you to filter them by title and tags.

The icon

The new icon was designed by Jono Hunt, and I think he did a great job. Marked 2 is a true evolution, and I think the refresh was overdue.

Additional goodies

I’m working on a series of videos that I’ll eventually incorporate into the documentation and the website. For now, you can find them in a Marked 2 YouTube playlist, and I’ll be keeping that updated as I complete them. There are currently “overview” videos for Link tools, document navigation and custom processors. I intend to create some more tutorial-style videos as well for things like generating custom styles, working with Marked’s special syntaxes and more.

The long-overdue style sharing setup is coming as well. I may end up just creating a forum for it, but the goal is to showcase and share some of the amazing custom styles people have built for Marked. There are some really cool ones out there! I’m hoping to migrate the various tips and tricks found around the support site – as well as custom styles – into a section of the main website. I still have some planning to do around that.

If you like Marked, I think you’ll love Marked 2. I appreciate all of the support I’ve received and I hope that this version lives up to expectations. I know I had a lot of fun building it. Feel free to drop me a line with questions. I’d also be happy to join anyone for an interview or podcast, if you think your readers/listeners might like hearing about the mad science behind this whole thing.

As I mentioned earlier, you can try Marked 2 free for seven days. You can purchase at any time, either from the website or within the application.

One more thing: Marked 2 is also included in Paddle’s “Cheaper By The Dozen” bundle today. You can get Marked 2 along with 11 other quality apps for $34.99. Visit Paddle’s website for more information!