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Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

MacOS only :(

Why don't people add that to the title? It would prevent non-mac users from getting their expectations up.

I launched last week an online Markdown editor that works in all recent browsers (IE support not perfect yet but will be).

It does intelligent preview (the paragraph being edited is kept into view and highlighted), has autosave and a simple document manager that lets you export HTML or markdown (RTF coming soon), and also has a converter, to convert rich text TO markdown (for your legacy content).

Check it out! It's called "Akayame" for Yet Another Markdown Editor, at http://akaya.me

There's a decent Linux alternative called ReText:

http://sourceforge.net/p/retext/home/ReText/ http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/retext-text-editor-for-markdo...

@wladimir and @anatoly, thanks! I have updated the title - "Markdown Editor for web developers, on Mac OS X"

Use emacs.app with markdown-mode and docpad für (almost) live preview.

-jsl

Ah, right, thanks. Out of sheer lazyness of setting something up I generally use the built-in github editor and preview these days. It works pretty well.

Even worse, it ssays for Mac OS X Lion only (apparently according to the comments it should run in Snow Leopard). I'm quite sure an overwhelming majority of Mac OS users don't run Lion (in fact I know nobody running it ATM), and a significant part would rather wait for 10.8 because of all of 10.7 idiosyncrasies.

Doesn't say it on the page either until the very bottom.

It's almost as if it's a statement _not_ to say it upfront. It transmits the unspoken assumption that you don't care about anything else or you don't expect your visitors to.

That's ridiculous. There's a screenshot at the top of the page; it's clearly on Mac OS X, and it isn't as if it claims to be a universal app for the whole planet. Personally I think if the page began with a giant "ONLY ON MAC OS X" disclaimer that would look more like he only cared about that.

It was just an oversight in the Hacker News post title which has now been corrected.

No, it isn't ridiculous. I've seen many projects available for multiple OS's that choose to advertise themselves with a Mac screenshot (or a Windows screenshot, or a Linux screenshot) at the top. The screenshot by itself says it runs on Macs, but doesn't establish that it's Mac-only; you need to read all the way to the bottom to make sure of that. It's disdainful of a non-Mac user; that may be accidental, but I've seen this more often on Mac product sites than on Win/Linux product sites.

Your "giant ONLY ON MAC OS X disclaimer" is a strawman; what would be normal and courteous is simply mentioning that it's for OS X somewhere at the top. There are many, many product sites that do it successfully (e.g. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom).

The post title on HN is a separate issue that's actually less of a problem. A random link to a product on HN doesn't carry an implicit assumption that it'll run on my OS. I don't mind clicking on it and discovering it doesn't (and besides, the author can't control the text of a link that leads to their site). But when I need to scroll down five pages on the site to ascertain I can't actually use it, that's irksome.

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