OctoNote

OctoNote got it's second release in February, which included a new Editor Theme Picker for Premium!

On November 9th I launched OctoNote to the App Store and began my slow drip marketing push. More to come!

After an initial rejection due to verbiage on the OctoNote Premium page, OctoNote was approved for distribution on the App Store!

I learned a lot from building my first iteration of OctoNote during WWDC and the following month. How to authenticate with OAuth2 and create a GitHub OAuth app. How to parse and display markdown with regex and native iOS libraries like TextKit. What I was left with was a pile of code for authentication and markdown parsing - code that worked! - but not a great experience.

At the beginning of August I rebooted OctoNote and began architecting a new design with a focus on your list of notes/Gists and a more logical login flow with OAuth2.

At this point I also decided to use Down, an iOS library for markdown parsing to handle the more complex edge cases of markdown that my home-grown class wasn't handling, and spend more time building an app around the editor.

While attending Apple's WWDC 2018 I was frustrated by my divergent note-taking workflow during the conference. Half my notes were on my iPhone in Notes, the other half I was composing in GitHub in the browser while using my MacBook.

With that particular problem in mind, and after hearing talks about new iOS 12 AuthenticationServices and a great talk on TextKit, I decided to build a markdown-based note app that would merge my mobile and GitHub-based note workflow.