I've really liked working on Maverick over the past few days. I want to be blogging more and the improvements I've been making will definitely lead to that end. I deployed my metadata update I wrote about and things are showing no sign of issues. So now I'm on to the next step: better authoring and site maintenance tools.

For a long time I have wanted to make a set of Mac & iOS apps that would let me more easily manage my site. But I've had soem struggles figuring out how best to structure things (I'm starting with the Mac apps because I've long been an aspiring Mac developer). I could make one app that can manage the whole site, and author the needed textbundle files. Or, I could make a couple of different apps: one for basic site maintenance that would facilitate taking in new textbundles from any app you wanted to write in, and another for actually doing the writing.

I don't think there's an app out there right now that does textbundles really well at an affordable price. I've used Ulysses but it has its own syntax for things and you'd have to export files to get them out as a textbundle. Currently I'm a BBEdit user and while I do like it for many things, I think the UX on having markdown files with inline assets could be improved. I'd like to build a really nice textbundle editor as a standalone app.

I don't have any timeline for either of these apps, and honestly I'm not sure which one to build first. I think the textbundle editor may see a broader audience (since I'm the only one using Maverick as a blog engine that I know of). So maybe I'll give that one a go first, especially since I can wrangle up scripts to help with publishing kinks. Okay, I've convinced myself 🙂

I do also want to play with Catalyst, so this would be a really nice opportunity to use iOS to make iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps all with one codebase. Let's go.