One of those other commitments has been raising a small family. My son, Henry, will become a big-brother in a matter of hours or days, and in honor of that I’ve decided to update my only shipping iOS app: Shush.

Shush 1.0 was a simple, dare I say embarrassingly simple, project that came out of our interest as new parents in Harvey Karp’s Happiest Baby on the Block techniques for soothing infants in the first few months of life. Among the bag of tricks is shushing the baby, creating white noise with your mouth: “Shhh.” While this trick worked for us, it became a little exhausting to make the noise for as long as it seemed helpful to Baby Henry.

For the new baby, I anticipate using Shush again, so I decided to give it a facelift. I had imagined over the years since I first released it that it would be fun to have it embrace some of the iPhone’s playfulness and provide a highly skeuomorphic television-set style design. This is Shush 2.0:

Don’t get me wrong: I know I won’t win any graphic-design awards for this, although it represents a peak of my skills in that area. Those of you who remember Shush 1.0 will probably consider this at least slightly more visually appealing. I tried to maintain the simplicity of Shush 1.0 while livening up the interface. I actually simplified a bit by removing the “Start/Stop” button. To turn Shush 2.0 off, you just slide the volume to its lowest position. To make the TV metaphor work, Shush is locked to landscape orientation. But I positioned the slider so it would be easily and intuitively navigated with the thumb while “holding the phone wrong” in an upright position.

Also new in this release are Shush’s ability to make static noise in the background while you continue to use your iPhone or iPad. I imagine this will be handy especially for parents who want to produce that sweet, soothing static, but would also like to so catch up on Instapaper, Twitter, or whatever while they’re cradling the baby.

Finally, that skeuomorphic television static actually provides something of a hypnotic animated effect. Some users may find the visual display useful either for lulling themselves or for distracting and amusing a baby. From a technical standpoint I’m particularly proud of the effect. Inspired by a suggestion from Mike Ash, I implemented the static animation as an OpenGL Shader, so it runs almost entirely on the iPhone’s GPU. This means it is extremely efficient and not liable to slow down your phone or gobble up your battery. If you don’t like the TV static or just want to save even more power while Shushing, you can put the display to sleep and Shush keeps on Shushing.

I hope you enjoy Shush 2.0. Let me know if you give it a try or have feedback about my decisions in redesigning this simple application. To answer the inevitable question: yes, MarsEdit and Black Ink are still under development for iOS!

For a long time I’ve been hoping to improve MarsEdit’s media management capabilities. It already does a great deal to streamline browsing and insertion of images from Flickr, iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, etc., but it could do much, much more.

This release takes MarsEdit a step in that direction, giving the media manager window a minor UI overhaul, fixing bugs, and adding some new browser capabilities such as a zoom control for media thumbnails, and ability browse iPhoto pictures by “Faces.”

Lightroom users will be happy to see that MarsEdit now has limited support for Photo Collection Sets. As I’m not a dedicated Lightroom user, I may be missing some nuances of how this should work, so continue to give me your feedback about how MarsEdit hits or misses the mark with regard to Lightroom integration.

The update also includes a few fixes for nagging bugs. Of course, there are many more in the queue, so hold tight and stay tuned if your pet peeves haven’t been addressed this time around.

MarsEdit 3.4

• Media management improvements
  • New zoom control for browser thumbnail size
  • iPhoto Faces browsing support
  • Lightroom photo collection set support
  • Upload Utility window now resizable
• Flickr browser improvements
  • Now supports “Medium 640″ size
  • Only shows image sizes that are available for the selected image
• External Editing improvements
  • Now supports Byword in default editor list
  • Now displays a warning panel if the selected app is not installed
• Bug Fixes
  • Bookmarklet handler now heeds sourceHomeURL, sourceFeedURL, sourceName
  • Prevent a crash when selecting SVG format images
  • Disable width/height fields for non-image files in Upload Utility
  • Fix a bug where post IDs were sometimes not saved for posts and pages

Brent told me at one point that it was called MarsEdit, because “Mars is cool, and Mars is far away.” It turns out that was the abbreviated version of the story. I was treated to a longer version in Brent’s talk at Çingleton a few weeks ago, and now he’s shared it with the world via his blog. The name was inspired by a Seattle cafe called “Free Mars”:

I was thinking about names I thought were awesome, and remembered one of my favorite place names: the Free Mars café in Belltown. It occurred to me that “Mars” was perfect, because Mars is cool, it fits with NetNewsWire’s space theme, and Mars is at a distance.

I probably never would have named the app MarsEdit. Who knows what it would have been, had it grown up from birth under my care. But by the time I took over the app, I was such a MarsEdit fan, as a long-time customer myself, that the name just rolled off of my tongue. Of course I would keep it.

I was just reading the eulogy from Steve Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, printed in The New York Times. She recalls Steve’s general obsession with “love.” I think many of us who care deeply for Apple and its products are touched by the emotional angle the company applies to its designs. It has been an honor to inherit MarsEdit because it’s also a very emotional product, to its passionate users and for its developers, past and present. Brent’s story helps to underscore that legacy.

A new per-blog setting lets you specify whether the text in a post should tend towards RTL. When this is set, MarsEdit’s rich text editor will show paragraphs with a RTL orientation, without altering the underlying HTML markup. This is based on the assumption that RTL blogs use CSS rules in the blog theme to impose the RTL directionality by default.

I’ve beta-tested the directionality changes with a few native writers of RTL languages, and they seem satisfied with the solution as it avoids them having to manually change each paragraph’s direction while writing. If you are a RTL writer and you think I’ve done something wrong in the implementation, please be sure to let me know.

Complete change list for 3.3.5:

• Support a new per-blog setting for default writing direction, to benefit right-to-left language bloggers
• Change default keyboard shortcut for full screen toggle to cmd-ctrl-F, the standard for Mac OS X
• Prevent a crash that could occur with some systems like Sina.com that return empty string instead of expected array
• Fixes to make uploaded images target the desired blog more reliably
• Fix a bug that prevented “Send to Blog” button from being clickable after launching from bookmarklet

• Fix issues that caused side-panels to shrink gradually when collapsed/expanded
• Fix a problem that prevented the width of the blogs list area from being restored across launches
• When main window’s preview is collapsed, it’s now kept collapsed when window size is increased
• Fix a crash that could occur when removing the last item from the Uploaded media list
• Fix a crash that could occur when “unsplitting” a post or searching/replacing in rich editing mode
• Fix a crash that could occur when authorizing Flickr

This update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page. It will be available for update via the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves the release.

After I get settled in to our new home in Boston, I hope to make a lot of progress on MarsEdit 3.4 and to continue chipping away at the long-longed-for MarsEdit Touch.

This update includes a change to improve the reliability of MarsEdit when posting to Tumblr. Previously, MarsEdit used an “API URL” for Tumblr that worked reliably, but which has recently been changed by Tumblr to fail with an error.

This release also includes a few other important fixes, so I recommend updating even if you are not a Tumblr user. Complete change list:

• Improve Tumblr posting reliability by switching to an API URL that is less likely to report “over capacity”
• Improve memory efficiency for post editor documents
• Improve reliability of setting and removing links on images in rich text mode
• The main window’s post list area now stays the same size while resizing window

This release fixes an issue where scroll bars in the clue list appear awkwardly under Lion, and also addresses a pretty nasty behavior for customers who have downloaded the new version of Across Lite’s official solving app: opening puzzle files in Black Ink fails completely.

How can the simple act of downloading another app render Black Ink useless for opening files? It has to do with Apple’s file-typing system, and an evidently relatively undefined behavior when two different applications lay claim to the same file extension, but tag it as a different type.

When I released Black Ink 1.0 a few years ago, I adopted Apple’s latest file-typing system, based around Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs). These identifiers allow developers to provide more meaningful information to the system about what a particular file type is, what file extensions it correlates with, more basic types (like text) that it might be derivative from, etc. Developers who “own” a particular file type give it a UTI

Since Black Ink works primarily as an editor of Across Lite format files, a format that was not invented here at Red Sweater, it would have been appropriate for me to adopt the owning company’s UTI when identifying the files that Black Ink knows how to work with. The problem? Litsoft, the company that created Across Lite, had for years neglected to update their software much, and had never declared a UTI type for the file format.

So I declared my own. I did it politely, using my own domain name in the UTI: com.red-sweater.blackink.acrosslite. I did this purposefully rather than trying to make up something on Litsoft’s behalf, so that I wouldn’t be stepping on their toes when they inevitably defined their own UTI.

In the wake of Lion’s release, that’s what Litsoft finally did. Their latest update to Across Lite declares a definitive UTI type for Across Lite puzzle files, which is fantastic! The problem is, Black Ink 1.4 knows nothing about it. To make matters worse, on some users’ systems, the very act of downloading and trying Across Lite’s changed the system’s idea of what .puz files are.

So users who simply tried out another piece of software were suddenly unable to open puzzle files in Black Ink. Not a good situation.

In Black Ink 1.4.1, the Across Lite UTI for “.puz” files is now listed as an “imported file type” for Black Ink. This means that while Black Ink is not considered the authoritative app for this type (nor should it be), the system should consider it a suitable candidate for opening and working with “.puz” files, whether it thinks they are of Across Lite’s UTI, or mine.

This update addresses an annoying issue that popped up with Lion 10.7 and on Snow Leopard 10.6 when Safari 5.1 is installed: continuous spell-checking stopped working. It also improves the effectiveness of font-style changes in the rich editor, and includes a couple other minor enhancements.

• Fix for continuous spell-checking in Rich Text editor when Safari 5.1 is installed
• Fix a bug that prevented Font Panel size changes from applying to text
• Fix autoconfiguration to fail more gracefully on unrecognized blog systems
• Add “Edit With” external editor item to post list contextual menu

One cool trick in 2.6.1 is the way FastScripts behaves when your scripts include “keystroke” commands to synthesize keyboard presses. In the past, these scripts were tricky to get right in FastScripts, because the synthesized keystroke would be mixed up with the very keys you had used to invoke the script. Now, FastScripts will suspend execution of any such script until you release the keys that were pressed to invoke the script.

FastScripts 2.6.1 Changes

• Prevent conflicts with synthesized keystroke commands and keyboard shortcuts
• Fix for situations where FastScripts became the front app after running a script
• Fix the built in on-screen display windows to grow in height to fit displayed message
• Restore support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5

Unfortunately, this update is not available on the Mac App Store. Apple has now rejected it twice, citing the behavior of the app when it is used to run one of Apple’s own bundled scripts:

/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/Create New Message.scpt

This script is terrible to start with, but starting in OS X Lion, it simply doesn’t work. It fails with cryptic errors, and FastScripts faithfully reports them. Apple is rejecting FastScripts for the behavior of a faulty script that is bundled with OS X Lion.

The review process for App Store submissions is frustrating to start with: every release takes extra time and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to when an update will finally be made available to customers. I have to admit that sometimes the review team identifies serious bugs that I am glad to have fixed before releasing an app. But the benefit of that kind of review seems to be balanced by reviews like this one, where Apple’s own bugs are being cited as the cause for rejection my app.

I am confident that FastScripts 2.6.1 will eventually be approved for the App Store. In the mean time, any customer who owns the App Store edition can download and run the direct-sale version from my site.

It’s becoming more and more common for folks who use and love Markdown to expect it to behave the way a popular superset of the language, MultiMarkdown, behaves.

When I asked on Twitter how people would feel about MarsEdit replacing the standard default Markdown filter with one that does MultiMarkdown processing instead, the responsive was enormously enthusiastic: people want MultiMarkdown.

Because I believe that for all MarsEdit users who currently enjoy Markdown support, changing to MultiMarkdown will either be a non-issue or a god-send, I plan to make this switch in an update soon.

While I was looking into the current state of MultiMarkdown I learned that since I last looked into it, is has transformed from a Perl-script version like the original Markdown, into a blazingly fast, pure C version. This intrigued me, because it would be fantastic if while upgrading MarsEdit’s Markdown support to support more features and please more people, it could also become orders of magnitude faster.

The first hiccup I noticed when examining the source code is that it depended heavily on an LGPL open source library called GLib. While the LGPL license would be acceptable to bundle within a standalone tool in MarsEdit, it feels like overkill, and frankly, I’d rather have a standalone MultiMarkdown binary that doesn’t require any outside dependencies.

So that’s what I spent the last day doing.

My fork of MultiMarkdown adds an Xcode project, and a small but important number of code changes to substitute for what GLib was formerly providing. The result is a standalone x86_64/i386 binary that accomplishes MultiMarkdown filtering on any Mac running 10.6 or higher.

If you want to test this fancy new MultiMarkdown filter in MarsEdit:

1. Quit MarsEdit
2. Download MultiMarkdown Beta Filter
3. Unzip, and copy the folder named “MultiMarkdownBeta” to:

   [Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit -> TextFilters

4. Relaunch MarsEdit

Your MarsEdit preview window should now have a “MultiMarkdown” option in the preview window text filter popup. Select MultiMarkdown and see how it works for you as you preview Markdown-formatted posts in HTML Text mode.

I expect this version will have some bugs, which is part of the motivation for getting the adventurous among you to give it a try. The best way to report bugs is  by email or a message in the support forums. But if you just have low-key comments to make, this blog post would be an appropriate location as well. Thanks for your help!

Update, July 28: I’ve made major performance and correctness changes in the past day, so if you are helping to test the new MultiMarkdown filter, be sure to grab the latest version and update the copy in your MarsEdit TextFilters folder.