When I released MarsEdit 3.5 a few weeks ago, it included some very significant overhaul to MarsEdit’s handling of rich text formatting, including new support for customized formatting macros in Rich Text mode.

Given the large number of changes, I was not too surprised that a few annoying bugs snuck in as well. In particular, it became unreliable to apply some formatting options like heading and block quote in Rich Text mode. I took the opportunity while fixing those things to take care of a bunch of other little gotchas, including some more compatibility tweaks for the forthcoming Mountain Lion 10.8 release.

• Fix the preview window to recognize and substitute template placeholders in the section
• Fix a bug with Squarespace and Expression Engine not prompting for username/password on new blog
• Restore ability to set “Warn when no title” option on Blogger blogs
• Fix a bug that prevented some blog-configuration options from being selected after switching system type
• Restore ability to start a Header or Blockquote before typing content
• Pressing return twice to exit Preformatted works again
• Improve support for future releases of Mac OS X
  • Address an issue with icon view when resizing the Media Manager window
  • Avoid crashes caused by conflicting system libraries

Rich-Text Formatting Macros

When MarsEdit 3.0 was released two years ago, it marked a major transformation in the product. Previously the app was completely focused on providing a means to edit blog posts in HTML, Markdown, or other text based markup languages. With 3.0, I added the long-requested “WYSWIYG” rich-text editing that many customers prefer when working with web content.

But given the considerable work to achieve MarsEdit’s rich text editor, there were some loose ends. One of those loose ends had to do with the very powerful formatting macros available in plain-text mode. These formatting macros are completely user-customizable and allow users to add their own markup templates for virtually any kind of purpose, filling in the details with values from the editor such as the selection, the pasteboard, etc. Various complexities prevented this powerful formatting macro concept from being available to users in rich-text mode.

With MarsEdit 3.5, custom formatting macros are finally available in rich-text mode. I have already discovered some edge cases that don’t work perfectly, but for inserting arbitrary HTML snippets or “wrapping” the selected text in the rich editor with a particular style, these custom macros are very useful. Starting with this release, you can also customize the keyboard shortcut for any formatting macros, whether they are built-in or custom.

The possibilities are limitless, but to illustrate with a simple example, imagine you commonly find yourself wanting green text in your blog posts. The following formatting macro will take whatever text happens to be on the pasteboard, and insert it into the edited post with HTML markup for coloring it green:

Lion Full-Screen Mode

Shortly after Lion 10.7 was released, I added nominal support for full-screen mode to MarsEdit. The problem was, it wasn’t very useful for real-world writing scenarios. My mistakes? I merely zoomed the post editor window to occupy the entire height and width of the screen. Most users found this awkwardly huge editor space impossible to work comfortably in, so found themselves avoiding the full-screen mode, even though they liked the idea in concept.

I made a relatively simple tweak for 3.5 that should improve things dramatically. When you enter full-screen mode on Lion, the current width of your editor is preserved, and only the height is zoomed to occupy the full screen space on your Mac. Here’s a shrunken example for the MarsEdit post editor I’m using to write this entry:

Of course, it’s easy to imagine a number of ways that full-screen could be even more improved. Incorporating the preview window optionally into the space, offering to hide the Title and other fields, etc. But this is a step in the right direction.

Tumblr Tweaks

I won’t mince words: as a developer, I have a love-hate relationship with Tumblr. The service is immensely popular but in many regards their API (even the newer one, which I admit I’m not using yet) falls short when it comes to providing the services MarsEdit users expect. For example, it’s extremely frustrating that it remains impossible to upload images apart from photo posts. Over the years since I first added support for Tumblr, I have often wondered how much effort I should bother put in, when the service doesn’t seem too interested in catering to offline editing clients. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that many important features are supported by the API, and I haven’t had time to implement support for them yet in MarsEdit. I’m starting to chip away at those now.

MarsEdit 3.5 supports publishing entries to Tumblr as server-side drafts. I decided to tackle this one now because it’s one of the most frequently requested features from my Tumblr-using customers, and because it’s possible to implement correctly with Tumblr’s API. I tried to tackle “queue” type posts with this release as well, but ran into issues with the API that forced me to put that back on the shelf for now.

I also made some minor adjustments to the post editor UI for Tumblr to prevent some issues with Quote and Chat style posts.

Everything Else

I managed to fit a lot of little fixes and nagging shortcomings for this release. It’s hard to quantify all of those little details with much more than a bullet line in a list, so I’m listing the complete list of changes below. Hopefully you’ll just find this release to feel overall more finished and refined than before, and I hope to continue that trend on into the future.

• Highlighted Enhancements
  • Improved support for Lion full-screen mode
  • Custom Formatting Macros now work in Rich Text mode as well as HTML mode
  • Support for editing Tumblr Draft posts
• Post Editor enhancements
  • A number of improvements to Rich Text editor to address minor formatting bugs
  • Unified Formatting Macro menu for HTML and Rich Text modes
  • Draggging an image to the post editor now causes inserted image to go to expected target location in text
  • Fixed performance issues that could cause very slow typing in some configurations
  • Fixed keyboard-based text selection in the HTML editor to avoid getting stuck on line endings
  • Fix a slight mismatch in background color between Rich and HTML Text editing modes
  • Work around hanging issues with External Editing in some apps
• Tumblr-specific enhancemeents
  • Added support for server-stored Drafts
  • Fixed Word Count feature to work properly with Tumblr Quote and Chat posts
  • Revised Tumblr interface for Chat-style posts to prevent formatting problems
• Other changes
  • Added support for browsing Lightroom 4 libraries
  • New support for unicode characters in URLs
  • Bug fixes for improved Media Manager reliability
  • Fixed an issue where uploaded attachments would fail without prompting for password on authentication errors
  • Added support for authenticated proxy servers
  • Prevent a crash that occurred when working with Blog.de system’s categories
  • Improved XML sanitizing to increase compatibility with malformed blog content
  • Fix a bug that prevented locally added tags from becoming part of the tag-suggestion history

I focused again on puzzle printing improvements for this update. Significantly, Black Ink now supports an option to position the puzzle grid on the bottom-left or bottom-right of the page. This is a more natural solving position for many people, because it allows you to keep more of the clues visible while writing answers into the grid.

Here’s a taste of how the printing configuration and preview panel looks in 1.5:

Complete list of changes:

• Support new options for printing puzzle grid at the bottom of the page
• Cleaner printing layout for fit-on-one-sheet printing
• Improve speed of printing puzzles

This release is important for MarsEdit customers who use the integrated Flickr browser to insert images into blog posts. In particular, if you tend to use the “Medium” size embed, this update is critical to restore the app’s ability to insert photos of that size.

What happened is Flickr added some new image sizes: “Large Square” and “Small 320″. MarsEdit didn’t know what to make of either of these, and ended up calling each of them “Medium” too. So customers were seeing three medium items in the menu, and it was only ever possible to select the first one.

This update fixes the problem at hand and further fixes the way MarsEdit handled Flickr embed sizes so that should they add additional items or rename the existing ones, MarsEdit should adapt more elegantly.

I highly recommend this update for anybody who has installed the Safari 5.2 beta release on Lion, or who is running a developer preview of a future OS X release.

MarsEdit 3.4.3

• Fixes to improve with the Safari 5.2 beta
• Fixes to improve with a future OS X update
• Prevent a possible hang while parsing Lightroom libraries

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.