Desk 3.0 now available in Mac App Store, latest iteration of simple text editor

Of all of the various writing and blogging tools for the Mac, one of my perennial favorites is Desk by John Saddington. The app provides a truly minimal interface that doesn’t get between a writer and a blank piece of virtual paper, and for WordPress bloggers it’s one of the easiest ways to write and publish posts. Desk 3.0 is now available, designed especially for macOS Sierra with better tools for managing stories.

One change is quite simple: a dark mode for those who don’t want to have a blank white page staring at them or for writing at night. Groups and tags have been added so that stories can be easily marked with a few clicks, and the controls for publishing to WordPress have been refined as well.

Adding images to WordPress posts is as simple as just dragging and dropping them into the content, and there’s support for embedded video from YouTube and Vimeo, with more coming soon. A new preview mode provides real-time updating as you make changes, and posts can be published instantly with the app’s powerful Quick Publishing feature.

Writing can be done as WYSIWYG, and Markdown fans can feel free to use their skills to speed through writing the Great American Novel. Two things I really love are the iCloud integration for syncing and automatic backup, as well as the realtime meta information like character and word count, time to read, and writing mode. 

Desk was a winner of “Best App of the Year” laurels for both 2014 and 2015, and it’s currently featured on the main carousel in the Mac App Store. The price is currently $14.99 as a 25% off launch special before it goes back to the regular $19.99 price tag; note that this is a paid upgrade due to the wealth of changes made to the app.

We’ll have a full review of Desk 3 soon.