Several months ago I wrote a
program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors /
sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be
represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have
walk me
through things, however, I've made it available as a free app
on
the Mac App Store:
It's now a single menu bar app, which offers a few options:
In addition to normalizing your clipboard, it can also convert copied
rich text to markdown and back again.
It's amazing how much software development has changed in the last few
months. In December, when I made the first version, it was simple
enough that I think I still wrote it by hand (with some asking
questions to Claude) and then Claude walked me through using Platypus to package the
script as a Mac app. This time I just said I wanted it in the Mac App
Store and Claude rewrote it to be compatible. This included:
Replacing Pandoc (GPL and so
incompatible the the App Store TOS) with SwiftSoup.
Writing Swift code to wrap SwiftSoup.
Merging the separate "Normalize Clipboard" and "Markdownify
Clipboard" apps into a single menu bar app.
Making it show a little toast describing what it had just done,
including an FYI if you tried an impossible conversion.
Adding tests, including ones for XSS and others for very strange formatting.
Fixing a few edge cases the old one mishandled.
Walking me through the App Store review process.
I needed to provide a little guidance, in telling it where I wanted to
draw the line on which formatting to keep, and I did notice a few
small conversion bugs.
It failed the review process the first time, mostly because I was lazy
and skipped Claude's recommendation to make a demo video. The second
time it got through fine.
Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store:
It's now a single menu bar app, which offers a few options:
In addition to normalizing your clipboard, it can also convert copied rich text to markdown and back again.
Video demo:
youtube
It's amazing how much software development has changed in the last few months. In December, when I made the first version, it was simple enough that I think I still wrote it by hand (with some asking questions to Claude) and then Claude walked me through using Platypus to package the script as a Mac app. This time I just said I wanted it in the Mac App Store and Claude rewrote it to be compatible. This included:
I needed to provide a little guidance, in telling it where I wanted to draw the line on which formatting to keep, and I did notice a few small conversion bugs.
It failed the review process the first time, mostly because I was lazy and skipped Claude's recommendation to make a demo video. The second time it got through fine.