Launching today
Atlas
A companion to your creative works
5 followers
A companion to your creative works
5 followers
Atlas is a native iOS and Mac workspace for writing, researching, and organizing your creative projects in one place. A bespoke Markdown editor sits at its core, paired with canvases, research storage, a web clipper, and flexible exporting tools. Atlas keeps you focused, gives your work a safe home, and brings just enough structure to support _your_ creative process, without getting in its way.
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Hey everyone! Twice in one year? I am on on fire 🔥
Atlas grew out of the in-ability of other to meet my needs for writing and world building back around 2022:
I love Markdown as a format to write in. I think it’s much easier to prevent issues with markup and it can be transformed into so many outputs.
I lost work, a lot of work, through bad sync mechanisms tacked onto services like DropBox. It just wasn’t good and I preferred the ease of iCloud.
The iPad apps were often, at best, usable. When inspiration strikes, I want to be able to jot it down or write wherever I am and I work on a desktop if not an iPad or iPhone. I wanted an app that had feature parity on all platforms. I am tired of baby software _ugh_. I like and appreciate integration across the Apple ecosystem.
Overall, many apps were aging and just needed some lovin’ + continued iteration. I personally feel that all apps need this nowadays.
Atlas was created to solve these problems and provide a solid experience for written creative workspaces. In fact, throughout the development cycle, my goal was always to do better by looking at some of the best apps to refine Atlas’s feature set, which you can see an overview of on the website: https://contagious.dev/atlas/features/. I also maintain an up to date help documentation website which basically outlines _all_ of the functionality as well as how it works: https://contagious.dev/help/atlas/. But, to keep it short, I think the feature page’s snippet on the creative workspace really hits it on the head though:
On a working level, it supports Markdown text documents with a “hybrid rich” editor, Canvases, Folder Outlines, Media, Web Pages, and Apple Pencil Sketches as document types, and organizes content into Projects which open in a workspace with an Organizer, Editor, and Document Inspector. There’s a deep search which works alongside tags and metadata, a web clipper that can selectively pull and transform web content into markdown and built as an extension (so available on any browser on iOS and most on macOS), templates, and a (in my opinion) high quality export/publishing tool among some of the highlights.
On a functional level to meet my goals: it uses a completely custom Markdown parser, editor, and rendering pipeline. Sync wise, it is _built on_ iCloud using a robust engine built up ~6 years and designed for the needs of Atlas’s document sync. At las is designed to keep work space as well with document history, conflict management that is very easy to navigate for complex situations the system can’t reason, and easy ability to export projects in bulk. I’ve also been an iOS and mac developer since 2008 so… I know and love what I am doing :)