Introducing Gather, a Cocoa Markdownifier

I wrote something a couple of nights ago that I thought I’d share. I’m calling it “Gather,” and it’s basically an “appified” version of my Readability/Markdownify work. A Cocoa version of Marky the Markdownifier, if you will. You can paste in a URL and it will attempt to find the core text of the page, download it and turn it into Markdown for clean web clipping. It displays the result in a field you can copy from, and it can optionally auto-copy the result to your clipboard.

It’s a little shaky, especially on sites with bad markup. I’d say that right now it has about a 60% success rate. As I have time to work on it I’ll be improving this and adding a bevy of features that may eventually become an App Store submission. We’ll see. This proof-of-concept version¹, however, is free to download. I’ll ask nicely that you please not steal the idea and beat me to the punch.

This build is Lion-only; it won’t run at all on Snow Leopard. I’m not really taking any feature suggestions right now, as I already have an extensive roadmap for it that will turn it into something highly useful in many situations (and I’m quite aware of what it lacks in this state). I would enjoy hearing from you with your reactions, though.

Credit due

This version uses GGReadability by Curtis Hard. You should definitely check out his work-in-progress app, Caffeinated. It’s an RSS reader with Google Reader support and some serious potential. I’m also using HTML2Text for “markdownifying.”

Enjoy.

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