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Some advice...

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Craig Hockenberry

04 Jun, 2015 07:27 PM

The value I find in Marked is to display my words in a nice format. I write in BBEdit and read in Marked.

A trend that I see happening is you adding a lot of extra stuff I don't need to the window where my words appear. This distracts from the task at hand: proofreading.

(The most recent thing, is the blue bar at the top of the window. At first I had no idea what this was, but eventually realized that it was a scroll position indicator. Which is really stupid, because that's what the scrollbar is for. And figuring out how to turn off these things in preferences is like finding a needle in a haystack.)

This creeping feature-ism can kill a product. Marked does one thing really well: don't let all kinds of oddball features that people ask for be front and center. Either hide this shit in preferences or put it in some kind of sidebar/popover that doesn't detract from the content.

-ch

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Brett on 04 Jun, 2015 08:30 PM

   

   Thanks for the input. Whenever a feature has an effect on the interface,
   I've always made an effort to disable it by default, and offer the
   option in preferences, but will reevaluate as needed.

   Regarding the progress bar: in recent versions of OS X, the scrollbar
   hides by default. This means that if you're using Marked's navigation
   tools to jump to headers or bookmarks, or if Marked's position changes
   drastically because of a refresh and scroll-to-edit, there's not a
   visible scrollbar to show where you are in the document. That was the
   impetus for the feature, but it's easily toggled off with the "Show
   scroll progress indicator" preference, which is grouped under "Preview"
   preferences along with other features that affect the preview window
   display (a regrouping it underwent, though still lacking in elegance,
   after your earlier comments).

   Beyond the progress indicator (which should have been off by default,
   I'll look into why those preferences are initializing improperly), there
   shouldn't be anything in the default preview that prevents clean display
   of the render. I've made a concentrated effort to maintain that.
   Interface features are disabled by default, and proofreading
   features/writing tools such as keyword highlighting (and spell checking
   in the next update) are all hidden behind menu items with multi-key
   shortcuts so as not to inhibit normal operation.

   The next update does have simplified setup. It's a two-step process with
   2 options per page. 2 choices and you have a setup customized to your
   needs (coder -> syntax highlighting (y/n), writer -> (academic, prose)).
   All cruft disabled by default, and there's an option to disable things
   like advanced statistics (readability, reading time, etc.) with one
   preference.

   I understand that Marked's feature set has grown large. With each
   version I've focused on a different category of writers, and added
   features to improve a specific genre. At this point I really should
   split it off into separate apps: "Marked for authors," "Marked for
   Academics," "Marked for technical writers," and "Marked for bloggers,"
   but that's an undertaking I'm not able to handle.

   -Brett

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