Taking Notes and Writing in Markdown – My Current Workflow

My wife and I are currently on vacation in India, lounging on the beaches, eating fresh shrimp every evening and having a great time. Before we left though, two things happened—I changed my writing workflow and spent some time with Dan Counsell of RealmacSoftware, talking about Markdown writing tools.

Dan and his team are currently working on Typed for Mac, which I’ve had the privilege of using for these past few weeks. I offered some suggestions which would help make it the best editor for me—I have specific requirements and workflows which make my life easier. Naturally, everyone has their own, hence it’s extremely hard to satisfy everyone’s tastes. However, since I use an iPhone, iPad and Mac, my current needs are only satisfied by Writer Pro from iA. Let me explain why…

Whenever I review anything, I almost always begin with my notes. I try to keep them all in one place, so as not to miss anything. Since Vesper for iPhone debuted, I used it exclusively. Brent, Dave and John created a great tool and since a Mac version is on the way, I’ll be revisiting my workflow when it comes out. In the meantime, since Writer Pro added Dropbox support, I switched.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been creating my notes on the iPhone or iPad, keeping them in iCloud Drive. I started using Writer Pro’s suggested workflow, placing them in the appropriate categories depending on the stage they’re in: note, write, edit, read. When I start fleshing them out, it’s usually on my Mac or iPad (with Apple’s Wireless Keyboard attached). When I’m done, I move them to Dropbox to archive them. First of all, this has removed the need to copy and paste anything between apps and secondly, it’s just much easier navigating between them. Since Document Pickers and advanced sharing options are now available in iOS 8, perhaps Brent Simmons will add the necessary support to allow using Vesper’s notes with other software seamlessly.

Writer Pro is naturally far from perfect and I also use Byword as a fallback, especially if I need to post something to WordPress—it makes it much easier when traveling iPad-only. And since we’re currently away, I only have my iPad with me, but I can’t wait to get back and see the new stuff Typed has introduced. The one thing I’d love to see is an advanced search-and-replace function, like the one in BBEdit for example. Keeping my fingers crossed for some sort of focus and typewriter modes too, so that the line I’m working on is always in the middle of the screen. Typed has potential and I can’t wait to see what Dan & Co. do with it.

In the meantime, I’m hitting the beach… Cheers!