Writing Kit Gets Custom URL And MathJax Support

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Now Writing Kit will talk to other apps
Now Writing Kit will talk to other apps.

Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.

Writing Kit has been billed as a mobile research lab, and that’s accurate enough. It consists of two main parts: a Dropbox-syncing, Markdown-friendly text editor, and a web-browser for research. This browser is tied to various online accounts like Pinboard and Instapaper so you can save and open things quickly. It also talks to the text editor so you can insert links and pictures into your articles.

I use it every day. I’m writing this post in Writing Kit.

The new URL schemes let other apps open Writing Kit, and lets them send text that will become the title and body of a new article. The in-app help contains an example snippet of javascript which can be pasted into a Mobile Safari bookmarklet. Once installed, you can highlight some text and tap the bookmarklet. The title of the page (or its URL) becomes the title of a Writing Kit post, and the highlighted text is the body.

This paves the way for other apps to interact with Writing Kit.

There are some other new features, too: MathJax support has been added (MathJax is kind of like Markdown for math) and you can now choose which Evernote notebook your pages are exported to, for instance.

And those bugs I mentioned? You can’t copy text from the browser (there is an option to do this, but it never works) and you can’t open images in other apps (also an offered feature).

Despite this, Writing Kit is one of my favorite iOS apps.

Source: Writing Kit

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