When I decided to start using Markdown and TextMate to handle all of my blogging, the one thing that was lacking was a nice way to preview the output. TextMate has a markdown preview, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, so I would publish everything as a draft and preview it in the browser. This pretty much defeated the purpose of removing myself from the web based UI provided by Tumblr.

In my searches for Markdown related information, I found Marked and added it to my Safari reading list to revisit. After checking out the website, visiting the app store and reading some reviews, I decided to pull the trigger, spend the $4 and give it a shot.

Marked is not an editor. It references a file in another editor and renders a preview generated from your markdown as you update and save your file. I have it sitting next to TextMate right now and every time I hit save, I get to see what the output will look like.

One of the coolest features is the ability to add your own custom CSS to be applied to the output, so once I get that in place, my rendered preview should look exactly like a post on my blog will look. So now, with my new setup I can write, preview and publish without ever opening a browser.

They also have great support! I ran into a glitch when trying to display a code block that included script tags. I posted to the support site and I don’t even think ten minutes went by before I had a response from one of the developers. He let me know that there was already a fix in place for the next update and also supplied with a simple work around to use for now. I am very impressed with that kind of immediate response!

If you work with Markdown on a mac, I highly recommend heading over to the App Store and checking it out.