What I missed: Markdown in OneDrive and SharePoint

I hope you're enjoying the summer if it's summertime where you are. Here in the outskirts of Toronto it's been a toasty summer mixed with some forest-fire-smoke-filled days and a lot of excitement with the FIFA World Cup games. This Friday the CNE Exhibition ("The Ex") starts which means the end of summer vacation is near and the kids will be heading back to school.

Thanks to each of you for subscribing and sorry for ghosting you. I switched hobbies a couple of times since I started the note-app review one back in 2021. I recognize some of the app reviews are stale and I'm planning to do a round of updates on them if there's enough interest.

So what have I been doing instead of writing Android note app reviews? Well, let me tell you about the latest obsession.

It's thebeans.ca!

I started a new hobby last year related to coffee, specifically coffee beans. I got a Ninja Espresso machine and then needed to find great local coffee roasters. There was no local directory for this and, around the same time, I wanted to learn about generative AI ("genAI") coding.

Putting two interests together, I decided to build a coffee roaster discovery site. Then I took on a Data Engineering team at work and wanted to learn more about data. So, down a deeper rabbit hole I've gone, and I'm now working hard to build the world's most comprehensive curated data set of coffee roasters. At this point I've got 1,731 roasters across 93 countries and 815 cities with thousands more to verify.

Please check out https://thebeans.ca and tell a friend. If you're into coffee, you can follow along on Instagram @thebeans.ca or Threads and suggest a new entry!

It turns out I wasn't the only note-app loving person trying out genAI coding, ahem "vibe coding".

Vibe coding gone wild!

Parker Klein, the Developer of the Twos app, has completely rebuilt his app using genAI. That blew me away because he had spent years hand coding the original version and he hasn't written a line of code for the new one, instead using Claude Code. You can read the whole story on Parker's post.

For my coding, I've been using Visual Studio Code and signed up for a personal Copilot Pro license as our work is a Microsoft shop. This isn't cheap. My last month's bill came to $143 CAD.

Markdown in OneDrive and SharePoint!

Back in May Microsoft finally introduced Markdown support in OneDrive and SharePoint. This means that all of your *.md files are viewable using OneDrive's Web interface or mobile app instead of appearing as plain text.

You can also now create new Markdown files right in the browser. Just use the "Create or upload" button and choose the "Markdown document" menu item. Here's what the page looks like, minus the --- part --- at the top of the file that I added:

As a first shot at it, Microsoft did OK. It supports live preview in split-pane mode or you can choose to just see the raw Markdown. It also supports tables, light mode and dark mode, inline images and all of the basic Markdown formatting like bold, italic, strikethrough, and 3 levels of headings.

On the downside, it doesn't support highlighted text and the Markdown preview does have a bit of trouble with YAML Frontmatter, see the highlighted parts above. That's me highlighting using Snipping Tool on Windows in case it's confusing.

Back in my hole

That's about it for this update. I hope everyone out there is doing well, keeping healthy, and taking great notes.

Stone.