It had to happen: I just got Sherlocked!

I released the first version of PreviewMarkdown, a macOS utility that provides QuickLook previews and Finder icon thumbnails of Markdown files, in 2019, and I’ve been offering it since Spring 2020 on the macOS App Store. Yesterday I learned Apple has added just such a utility of its own to the macOS 27.3 beta.

I’m not for a minute saying that Apple nicked my idea, and I’m kind of pleased that it didn’t do this three or four years back when the macOS SDK had Markdown parsing tools added to its NSAttributedString object. I didn’t use them because I wanted to support earlier versions of the OS, right back to 10.15 aka Catalina. But I could just make out some writing on the wall.

Later macOS releases hinted at the presence of a Markdown QuickLook utility, so I always expected one to be released eventually. At least I got some sales (not enough to retire on, alas) in before Apple renders my app monetarily valueless!

Since I’m primarily motivated by a love of coding, I’ll never consider the work I’ve put into PreviewMarkdown over the years in any way wasted. I built two different rendering engines, and two different UIs. I got a lot of great feedback from users that fed into fresh updates and new features. It tought me a lot about build and test scripting.

Besides, PreviewCode, which provides QuickLook previews of dozens of source code, script and config files, was always more popular. And still on sale. 🤞 it’s not on the Mac maker’s radar too!