Bartender 1.0

Bartender has become an essential app for my Macbook Air. As the number of menu bar icons has increased, it has only become more important.

I basically keep the six most important icons up there (Fantastical, Sticky Notifications, WiFi, Volume, Battery, in addition to the time, Spotlight and Notification Center).

Hidden away are the distracting ones (Wedge, Tweetbot, Trillian, Hiss) and the ones that I use occasionally like Moom, Hazel, Crashplan, Bluetooth, VPN, Clocks, Syncopy, Dropbox, Droplr).

If you're not using the new 1.0 version of Bartender, you're missing out.

Multimarkdown Composer

Yesterday, Multimarkdown Composer was released. I bought it because I'm a sucker for Markdown tools and I'm always checking new tools out. Fletcher was selling it for an introductory price, which I wanted to take advantage of while it lasted.

Some good and bad things about it so far.

1. BAD: I am not sure why I'd use this over Byword (which I'm writing this post in (in Markdown)). Byword is elegant and smart and handles most of my short-writing tasks well.
2. GOOD: I love that it integrates with Marked.
3. VERY BAD: I literally cannot use it without it crashing. Every. Time. I. Open. It. I'm not kidding. Every time. Not sure what the problem is but it's hardly conducive to productivity. I am running a Macbook Air 13" and using Dropbox but I'd think that's a pretty stock configuration. I guess I'll wait for a fixed version?

Hardly a glowing endorsement, I know, but having a multimarkdown tool that will operate in that space between "light" work (which I use Byword for) and "heavy" writing (which I use Scrivener for) would be pretty nice. I would probably use it daily if it was stable enough and had enough export features.

Once things stabilize, I'll write a follow-up post. Until then, I'll stick with my usual cadre of markdown tools -- Byword, Marked, BBEdit, NVAlt and Scrivener.