Generic AtomPub Support

AtomPub is a new specification for communication between a blog and a remote editor such as MarsEdit. To use MarsEdit with your AtomPub-compatible blog, select “Other AtomPub Compatible” from the configuration popup in your weblog settings, and enter the service document URL in the RPC URL field.

Please consider the AtomPub support somewhat “introductory.” It seems to work fine in my testing, but it hasn’t seen a whole lot of real-world use yet. I’m sure that development will be refined as I get feedback from users about security schemes you want to see supported, etc.

Customizable Image Markup

Now you can use MarsEdit’s powerful markup macros in the media window. In addition to the built-in macros for image alignment, you can add your own
to finely tune the markup that is used when inserting images or other files. Just select “Edit…” from the bottom of the popup menu that, by default, only contains alignment tags.

Performance Boost

Significant speed improvements to launch time and sorting the table of weblog entries.

And More…

• Support for removing unwanted items from the media catalog.
• New post table columns for viewing Tags or Post ID.
• A date editor pull down for easily selecting today’s date.
• Improved MIME type generation for uploaded files.
• Blosxom now uses the “Slug” field to specify the file name.

Hope you enjoy the update! Download it and let me know what you think.

Will I release versions of these applications for the iPhone? Most certainly. Without a doubt. When? That’s a bit tougher to answer. I want to release these applications as soon as I possibly can, but no sooner. That is, I don’t think it would be fair to the public or good for my reputation to release premature applications, so I’m taking “my sweet time” to be sure I’m at least satisfied that they are good, reliable 1.0 releases before I go public with them. Stay tuned!

In The Mean Time

So what is an anxious customer to do in the mean time? I appreciate that iPhone users find it extremely frustrating to imagine what powerful aides their devices could be to them, if only they had the right software. While I do expect that, in time, there will be no better way to blog or solves crossword puzzles on this device than with my software, there is other software that is worth mentioning.

Waiting For MarsEdit

In the blogging department, WordPress users at least should have something to tide them over soon. Matt Mullenweg has announced a native WordPress client, which is apparently complete and submitted to Apple. They’re just waiting for it to go live on the store. Since we can’t try it out yet, I can’t exactly vouch for it, but I hope it will be a step up from navigating the web interface from the phone!

The folks over at Six Apart have also released a native iPhone blogging client, but unfortunately it only works with their paid TypePad service, so it won’t be of much help unless you happen to subscribe to that service.

Waiting For Black Ink

The allure of crosswords on the iPhone must be pretty obvious, because there are already two applications available for downloading and solving puzzles, and they’re pretty good! I have enjoyed buying these applications and seeing how other developers have tackled the problem of displaying a crossword puzzle while also leaving enough room for the user to type in the answers.

The first, simply called “Crosswords,” was developed by my friend Ben Gottlieb, of Standalone, Inc.

Notice how they’ve developed a completely custom keyboard, which aside form sporting a monochromatic look, is also significantly smaller than the default keyboard. This leaves more room to show the puzzle content. The high quality of the custom artwork makes the application shine, although it’s clear the puzzle rendering itself could be a bit cleaner.

The other application, called “2 Across,” comes to us from developer Eliza Block.

Notice that she uses the default keyboard, but provides an extremely zoomable puzzle display that exudes quality. The rendering is extremely sharp and the touch responsiveness is immediate. I also like how she animates the puzzle when you select a square, so that the word is as visible as possible within the confines of the display.

Back To Work

It would have been a great joy to have my applications in the App Store on day one, but looking on the bright side, it will be somewhat easier to finish developing them and to release them in a known context. It’s becoming clearer by the day what people are looking for in the store, and the wealth of applications makes it easier to experience what works and what doesn’t work on this new platform.

Nice work, Shimone! It’s great to see examples like this. As I said, I think it’s nice the way MarsEdit hides much of its functionality away, but the flip side of that is of course that it can be difficult to realize its full potential. Blog posts such as Shimone’s do a good job of showing off its hidden strengths.

There are good arguments for this, at least on the face of things. They can be packed into a nutshell: it may reduce the security risks of having these access points opened by default.

But in my opinion, there are also good arguments to be made for rejecting the change as a damaging and misguided solution.

First, and obviously near to my heart, is the fact that this marginalizes remote clients. For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way. Historically, the remote editor interface is already compromised such that remote editors do not have access to all the same functionality as the web interface. With this change in place, things get even worse. While a screen-scraping application will easily log in and authenticate a fragile WordPress session via the web interface, the well-behaved API clients will be refused access by default. All in the name of improving security.

Second, and probably most important, is that this is not a fundamental security improvement. Consider a bank with two sets of automated cash machines: one for drive-through cars, and one for walk-up pedestrians. Two vastly different sets of customers are being served securely by different interfaces, yet the transactions are secure because they ultimately travel through the same bottlenecked safeguard. A fundamental design consideration on the part of the bank is that these two classes of customer are equally important, and each deserves unfettered access.

WordPress’s decision to shut off remote access by default is analogous to a bank offering unrestricted drive-through access to its cash machines, while requiring pedestrians to ring a bell and wait for a security guard to open the door to the machines.

Also worth considering: if a service is disabled by default for security considerations, what message does that send to people who choose to, or who are encouraged to turn the service back on? It sets up a perception of insecurity which may not even be warranted. If the remote publishing interfaces are insecure, they should be fixed, not merely disabled!

A Real Solution

If I’m so smart, what should WordPress be doing instead? A real security improvement would be bottlenecking all access to the blog’s vital authorized content, and making sure that the remote APIs and the web interface all go through the same interface.

In my opinion, an entire class of problems with WordPress (and other blogging systems) stems from this interface bifurcation. Establishing a single interface to WordPress would be comparable to the “pin code + card” interface at your bank. You pass through it by car, on foot, and even at the counter when they ask you to swipe before doing any transaction.

If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has.

Imagine if the API that the web interface uses to access all features of a blog could be just as easily employed by MarsEdit or any other application you authorized. The end result would be lots less work “playing catch up” for the XMLRPC and Atom developers, and more time focusing on innovative and cool features for all blog users.

If this sounds like a pipe dream, it’s worth pointing out that one very popular web service is already employing this strategy, and it works brilliantly. Flickr, Yahoo’s incredibly popular photo sharing site, is built on the very same APIs it makes available to clients. This results in some truly incredible Flickr-enabled applications and web services. And you don’t see any sign of Flickr disabling access to their API, because there’s too much at stake.

If your web service only provides one, first-class API through which all access flows, then you’ve only got one point to secure, you’re likely to have feature parity across interfaces, and the risk of marginalizing one interface is dramatically decreased.

Black Ink 1.1

• Dramatically improved puzzle printing quality
• Improved highlighting of active clue in clue list
• Fix for crashing scenario when migrating preferences to a new Mac
• Improved reliability of puzzle downloads
• Fix some bugs with timer restarting after pausing
• Updated default puzzle sources
  • New: Boston Globe Sunday
  • New: Little Rock Daily Record
  • Removed: Washington Post Sunday

It turns out printing is one of those features you can really start to obsess on. I am very happy with the improvements that have been made for 1.1, but just getting under the hood and having my hands dirty has taught me so much about how it can be improved even more.

Exactly what has gotten better with printing? For starters, the application does a better job of remembering your printing options (selectable from the Page Setup dialog). But the real joy is in the improved quality of the paper (or PDF) printouts you generate. The output is now much sharper and closer to “typesetting quality.” Finally, the layout of the clues list has been revised to offer more readable, flowing text that fills the width of the page more naturally.

For future updates, I’m looking forward to offering further refinements. At the top of my list is a preference for “handedness,” so you can print the puzzle grid at the appropriate side of the clues for your preferred solving hand. I also hope to increase the flexibility of clue and grid sizing, so that users with better or worse vision can get the most out of the printout feature.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

Update: Round version numbers are boring, right? If you already downloaded 1.1 be sure to grab the 1.1.1 update which fixes a really annoying issue with the very printing improvements I’ve highlighted here. In the hubbub of getting these new features in, I neglected to notice that for users who haven’t been incrementally using my private beta builds, the printing options would have been set to unfortunate default settings, which caused a nearly blank printout page :)

Many thanks to David Brown for spotting this and letting me know in the comments below.

MarsEdit 2.1.4

• Add a dock menu item for easily starting a new post
• Support uploading to specific Picasa album for Blogger users
• Prevent dragging a URL to preview window from loading that URL
• Fix display of tags in main window preview
• Safeguard against bad URLs that could cause a crash when refreshing

If you’re a Blogger user and want to take advantage of the new “specific album” feature, just type in the name of the album in the Media Manager’s Upload pane, where it says “in”.

Enjoy - and as always, let me know if you spot any problems!

Sorry it took so long, folks. FlexTime 1.2.2 now supports this!

Typically when a person on the web is kind enough to link to one of my sites, I learn about it quickly. Those of you who are not familiar with the way the web works might be surprised to know that whenever you click a link in a browser, the browser is typically kind enough to also tell the link’s target server where the link was clicked from. This is called the “referrer” and helps a great deal in tabulating statistics about web site visitors.

What’s really interesting about this referral reporting is that statistics software such as Mint can make it exceedingly easy to keep tabs on who is linking to you. Additionally, services such as Technorati and Google Blog Search attempt to keep tabs on where particular pages on the web are linking to, and offer RSS feeds so that you can keep tabs on any new links that might be pointing your way.

Suffice to say, if you are interested in doing so, it’s possible to keep a broad, open eye on what people on the internet are saying about you, provided they include a link to you among their thoughts.

Cutting To The Chase

I tend to skim every referral that looks like it might be from a legitimate source (not link spam). For instance, sometimes I’ll find a blog post where somebody reveals a problem they’re having with MarsEdit or another of my applications. If it’s possible for me to chime in with proactive customer support, I figure the user will be more overjoyed than creeped out by my “stalking” their blog post.

If you’re lucky enough to start getting linked a great deal, it can start to become a burden to evaluate all those links and decide whether any of them require (or would benefit from) your attention. Typically for me this has involved opening every such link in Safari, and then proceeding to glance at it to see where they are linking to me, and what the context is. This can be difficult on a long page, or when the person has attached the link to an unlikely phrase, such as “this guy says.”

What we need here is a computer. Something that can perform the painstaking task of looking at a web page and deciding where the important parts are. Once these important parts are brought to my attention, I can quickly evaluate and decide whether to quietly take in the referral, or whether to engage in some way with the author.

A Scripted Solution

Safari Link Exposer is a small script I wrote to facilitate this task. Let’s take a look at a sample web page I might encounter in my referral following. See how it’s possible to scan for the links to me, but they don’t exactly jump out from the page:

Now keep in mind this is an arbitrarily simple test case. Normally the web page might be pages long or a lot more complex. Even still, a significant amount of time is spent parsing the “unimportant” information to get to the all-important references to me. Now let’s look what happens when I run my keyboard-activated script in Safari:

Ouch! My eyes, they bleed! Help! But see, that’s the point. There’s no missing the links to me (in red with white text). The first-level container of said links are brightly lit in yellow to accommodate easily tracking to them, and the second-level container is lit in a more subdued yellow to broadly attract your eye’s attention.

Free Download: Safari Link Exposer

I used my shortcuts utility, FastScripts, to attach a Safari-specific keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-Cmd-F to the script. Now when I’m browsing my referrals I can zoom in on the nitty gritty with a single keystroke.

Hope this is helpful to somebody. The basic script needs to be edited to be useful to you, but it’s set up so that you can easily replace the “red-sweater” search term with a term of your choice. You could also use this script as the basis for other types of “smart scanning” scripts that expose elements based on other criteria.

It’s also worth noting that the bulk of the script is JavaScript and should be easily adaptable to other web browsers. I use Safari and I trust its AppleScript-based “do javascript” command, so naturally that is the approach I took in writing this.

Please let me know if you have any improvements for the script or other ideas for how to streamline this process.

Among the added goodies is a feature to allow easily sending a recipe from your catalog over to MarsEdit for easy blogging. If you run a food related blog, or just a personal blog which would occasionally benefit from an epicurean boost, this should greatly ease your workflow!

I love the idea of 3rd party applications using MarsEdit to bring the easy blogging to their users. In the future I’ll be looking at ways to offer improved mechanisms to other developers so that the process can be even more streamlined and customized.

What does this mean for MarsEdit users? It means the nifty future posting technique that I described in a previous blog post will now work with Blogger.

In short, all you have to do is set the date (from the Post menu -> Edit Date) before you send your post to the server, and if it’s in the future, Blogger will automatically delay publishing of the post until that time. This brings Blogger’s behavior in this regard into line with WordPress, which also supports implied future posting by date. You’re next, Movable Type :)

I haven’t thoroughly tested this because it just became available, but I sent a post to my Blogger blog with a date of two minutes into the future, and sure enough it didn’t show up until the 2 minute time had elapsed. As always, I recommend testing this feature on your own blog before posting anything of a time-sensitive nature.