A Quick Review Byword 2 For Mac OS

Usually I write my blog posts in Sublime Text Editor using Markdown and then I copy and paste into a Markdown format convertor before publishing them, but it is tedious and feels a bit crappy.

I evaluated and read up on a lot of different options until I came across Byword 2 for Mac. Even though it costs $13 AUD in the Mac App Store and then another $6 AUD for activating the premium publishing features, I dived in and decided to buy it.

Byword believe it or not is one of the cheaper writing applications in the App Store, I’m not writing a novel here and like clean minimal interfaces for writing my blog posts, so it seemed to fit my purposes well.

WordPress Export/Publish

This is one of the features that drew me to Byword, the ability to write a blog post and publish it right to WordPress from the application itself. This is an additional in-app purchase, but a highly recommended one.

The publishing feature works well, the only downside is the lack of image support, but the Byword guys/gals are supposedly working on that, so watch this space.

Support for a select few other platforms is also include in the in-app purchase including; Evernote, Tumblr, Blogger and Scriptogram.

Lacks Support For Flat-file CMS’s

This is one feature that Byword 2 is missing: support for publishing via FTP to a flat-file CMS like Droplets or Statamic. This is a feature I would love to see added in for managing flat-file CMS’s that use Markdown.

This is not a deal breaker obviously, but a definite nice to have and no doubt, a highly sought after feature.

Conclusion

Byword 2 is definitely worthy of a purchase. I will admit in the beginning I was sceptical, but if you write your blog posts or anything in Markdown, you need this app. The interface is clean, and doesn’t get in the way of your writing.