That’s why this is an app I create with special $ and skills that I don’t actually have! 
(But I really do think there’s room for something more user friendly than LaTeX or the special CSS-like hybrid export formats that Ulysses and iAWriter use.)
This is a good thing, and as I recall, a selling point stated by Literature & Latte. It’s the separation of content from presentation. When you write, get the words (and images) on paper. Think about what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. When all that is finished, then work on page layout and design.
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I’m not disputing the wisdom of separating content from presentation. If anything, writing in plain text markdown is an even more extreme example of that principal.
Rather, I’m bemoaning the current difficulty of taking that content and getting it into an acceptable presentation, particularly when the presentation you are going for is a paginated document (rather than an HTML web page).
Compare these scenarios:
If I’m writing an article for my blog, all I need to do is write in markdown, and then publish that markdown to my blog. The publishing platform (for me it’s Micro.blog, but the same thing works for many different systems), takes the markdown, converts it to HTML, and then applies the CSS to style the markdown so it looks the way I want it to when somebody views it in a browser. I may have to spend some time at the very beginning setting up the CSS to look the way I want. But once it’s done once, I don’t have to mess with it.
If I’m writing a legal brief (or other paginated document destined for .pdf), the process is more painful. I may be able to use my writing tool (whether that’s a plain text tool like iAWriter or Ulysses, or a rich text tool like Scrivener) to export my content as a paginated .pdf or .docx file. But the .pdf export only works if the export style is exactly what I’m looking for. Current tools to tweak that .pdf export are both difficult to use and limited in what they can do. Exporting to .docx, on the other hand, allows for further tweaking of the format in Word, but requires me to do that same tweaking each and every time I export a document.
There’s got to be a better way. I want to define a set of paginated styles and into which I can pour markdown content with no more friction than it currently takes to post markdown to a blog.
For the time being, that’s probably LaTeX, whose purpose in life is paginated layout.
In the future, perhaps someone will create something like ggplot, and it will be a grammar of page layout. Perhaps a domain-specific language that writes LaTeX or TeX as its output.
ggplot2 is a system for declaratively creating graphics, based on The Grammar of Graphics. You provide the data, tell ggplot2 how to map variables to aesthetics, what graphical primitives to use, and it takes care of the details
Exactly. That’s why my imaginary app would combine something like pandoc (to convert markdown to LaTeX) with some sort of LaTeX style sheet generator so that I could quickly generate paginated documents from Markdown.
(Imagine, for example, a shortcut that takes what you’ve written in Drafts, asks you to choose a contact, and then spits out a .pdf letter on your custom letterhead.)
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I’ve created a workflow for that. At my company, we have Word templates for memos, etc. (with company logo, from/to fields, etc.). It took my some hours to re-create everything in LaTeX, but now a can push text straight to a format/output that pleases the CD overlords. And since it’s LaTeX, references, TOC, illustrations…everything perfectly formatted.
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That’s awesome! Can you do that on iOS. Or Mac only for now?
A virtual assistent for the betterment of an individual (finance, love, health) for your phone or body implant.
No LaTeX for iOS… 
Not strictly true. Consider for start TexPad or TeXWriter. Also consider this recent post.
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JJW
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I use TexPad on the iPad. LaTeX is embedded into it and not accessible from other applications.
I would build an all encompassing life planning and goal setting app
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What would it do? (20 chars)
A multi-user photos app so a family could have a single photo store. Would allow 3rd party editing apps.
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Create a free Google account to use Google Photos for pooled uploaded images, then share the password amongst family members (you trust). They can edit with online tools, or download to whatever platform they’re on to edit and re-upload as a separate image, unless they delete the original - which is why you need to trust them.
I prefer that Google not have access to all my photos. Their privacy policies are lacking. Also would like separate users so there can be private libraries in addition to the shared space. Using Google this way isn’t much different than using Apple Photos with a single AppleID.
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Private libraries would be in your personal Google account.
Except for Google’s online photo editing, and superior sharing, and the difficulty in having multiple Apple IDs on mobile, and iCloud wanting to put all your photos on all your devices when Google doesn’t. But other than that, it’s it isn’t much different at all. 
If as per the OP’s question you want to spend untold dollars to build this competitor to Google’s free offering be my guest. 
I would do two things:
A) I’d just continue working on my plain-text focussed app for reading/annotation & personal knowledge management – but I’d work on it full time, make it open source, and strive to assemble a team so that there’d be cross-platform versions (web, and native mobile/desktop versions) from the beginning.
B) More interestingly perhaps and thinking a bit bigger, I’d try to build an organization which would strive to transform the academic citation habits (yes, I know, but one can dream…) so that we’d stop citing entire publications but instead:
- cite the actual sentence/statement within that paper/book
- always state the reason why the statement was cited
And this should all be done in a way that’s both human- and machine-readable.
IMO, being able to cite (i.e. link) to the bullet-point level and to specify why we’re actually citing/linking it, all in a parseable manner, will facilitate the next revolution in academics. Of course, other disciplines could also benefit from this.
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If I were wealthy enough, I’d build apps and websites for charities and offer my time for free. In fact, I do this for non-profits and research groups associated with the university where I work already, even though I’m not super-wealthy!
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