There's a lot of people criticising you for asking this, but don't listen. The poor craftsman might blame his tools, but the talented craftsman rarely works with low quality tools. (And if the quality of the tool doesn't matter, then what's the point of doing design at all?)
MarsEdit is good for Wordpress and Markdown (and apparently Gruber uses it, if that matters / bothers you). It allows you to work entirely offline and keep an offline archive, so you can prepare a bunch of articles without having to go live.
If you're looking for something to help structure and edit your writing, I recommend something like Scrivener. IA Writer is fine for writing your initial draft, but the interface isn't geared towards editing, it's really just a cut-down Word, and adopts a lot of Word's problems. Word and programs like it are actually designed for typesetting a document after it's been written and edited, they are garbage for the actual process of writing. Scrivener has a much more useful interface that allows you to keep track of themes, references, notes and the like. (Scrivener doesn't do Markdown, but ideally you shouldn't be doing layout until you've finished writing anyway!)
Lastly, I really like Devonthink as a note-manager and idea generation tool - this gives an idea of how authors use it.
There's a lot of people criticising you for asking this, but don't listen. The poor craftsman might blame his tools, but the talented craftsman rarely works with low quality tools. (And if the quality of the tool doesn't matter, then what's the point of doing design at all?)
MarsEdit is good for Wordpress and Markdown (and apparently Gruber uses it, if that matters / bothers you). It allows you to work entirely offline and keep an offline archive, so you can prepare a bunch of articles without having to go live.
http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
If you're looking for something to help structure and edit your writing, I recommend something like Scrivener. IA Writer is fine for writing your initial draft, but the interface isn't geared towards editing, it's really just a cut-down Word, and adopts a lot of Word's problems. Word and programs like it are actually designed for typesetting a document after it's been written and edited, they are garbage for the actual process of writing. Scrivener has a much more useful interface that allows you to keep track of themes, references, notes and the like. (Scrivener doesn't do Markdown, but ideally you shouldn't be doing layout until you've finished writing anyway!)
Lastly, I really like Devonthink as a note-manager and idea generation tool - this gives an idea of how authors use it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html?oref=login