Has Smartdown died?

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 4, 2015 at 06:30 AM

That’s a bit of a dramatic headline: any evidence of the final demise? Both of their websites seem to be still up:

http://www.neomobili.com/products/smartdown/ (Mac)

You can also email the developer; he did get back to me in the past fairly quickly.

There could be all kinds of reasons for lack of development. Partly it might be the lack of a forum that could engage users to drive development.

Let’s face it: this is a rather niche tool, targeting people who want a minimalist writing app using Markdown and CriticMarkup.

It doesn’t help that the software is a bit overpriced for what it is (at USD19.99), considering there are some free Markdown editors out there (though the CriticMarkup support is the key selling point here, which is very rare). At half that price it might be more reasonable (and successful?).

Also, currently the user needs a bit of know-how for editing the SmartDownGlobal.properties file to change the styles, so some extra controls to make that easier would help.

Having said that, I love SmartDown for its simplicity. While WriteMonkey is still my go-to app for writing (in Markdown), I then move the draft to SmartDown for editing with CriticMarkup.