Álvaro Ramírez

The App Store is a crowded space when it come to markdown apps. A quick search yields a wonderful wealth of choice. Kinda overwhelming, but a great problem to have nonetheless.

For those of us with org as our markup of choice, the App Store is far less crowded. I wish we could fill more than a screen's worth of search results, so you know… I could show you another pretty gif scrolling through org results. For now, we'll settle on a single frame showcasing our 4 org options.

Beorg, MobileOrg, Flat Habits, and Orgro are all great options. Each with strengths of their own. Organice, while not on the App Store, is another option for those looking for a web alternative. Of these, I had already authored one of them. More on that in a sec… You see, about a year ago I wanted to play with Swift, SPM, and lsp itself. Also, having Swift code completion in Emacs via lsp-sourcekit sounded like a fun thing to try out, so I started using it while writing a Swift org parser.

While working on the parser, I happened to be reading Atomic Habits (awesome book btw)… It was also a great time to play around with SwiftUI, which by the way, is pretty awesome too. With Atomic Habits fresh in mind, org parser in one hand, and SwiftUI in the other, I built Flat Habits: a lightweight habit tracker powered by org.

I love being able to save habit data to plain text and easily track on my iPhone (via Flat Habits) or laptop (via Emacs). I wanted to extend similar convenience to org tasks, so I built Plain Org.

My previous post mentioned quickly adding new tasks and searching existing ones as Plain Org's driving goals. Of course, neither of those are as useful without automatic cloud syncing, so pluging into iOS's third party cloud support was a must-have.

With these baseline features in place, I started an alpha/beta group via TestFlight. Early Plain Org adopters have been wonderfully supportive, given lots of great feedback, and helped shape the initial feature set you see below.

There's plenty more that can be supported, but hey let's get v1 out the door. Gotta start somewhere.