Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store:

It's now a single menu bar app, which offers a few options:

In addition to normalizing your clipboard, it can also convert copied rich text to markdown and back again.

Video demo:

youtube

It's amazing how much software development has changed in the last few months. In December, when I made the first version, it was simple enough that I think I still wrote it by hand (with some asking questions to Claude) and then Claude walked me through using Platypus to package the script as a Mac app. This time I just said I wanted it in the Mac App Store and Claude rewrote it to be compatible. This included:

• Replacing Pandoc (GPL and so incompatible the App Store TOS) with SwiftSoup.
• Writing Swift code to wrap SwiftSoup.
• Merging the separate "Normalize Clipboard" and "Markdownify Clipboard" apps into a single menu bar app.
• Making it show a little toast describing what it had just done, including an FYI if you tried an impossible conversion.
• Adding tests, including ones for XSS and others for very strange formatting.
• Fixing a few edge cases the old one mishandled.
• Walking me through the App Store review process.

I needed to provide a little guidance, in telling it where I wanted to draw the line on which formatting to keep, and I did notice a few small conversion bugs.

It failed the review process the first time, mostly because I was lazy and skipped Claude's recommendation to make a demo video. The second time it got through fine.