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 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

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.

I’ve been testing pre-release versions of Lion for months, and I’m happy to report that all shipping versions of my apps are 100% compatible with Lion. Even better, MarsEdit’s new full-screen mode is already adapted to work well with Lion’s built-in full-screen feature, and I have plans to improve the full-screen experience both in Lion and on 10.6.

After Apple releases 10.7, let me know if there are other ways I can change the software to work better with Lion’s features.

This is mostly a bug-fixes-and-tweaks kind of release, of course the fixes might not feel so minor if they’ve been nagging at you!

• Media Manager now remembers and restores last-selected folder across launches
• Fix a bug that prevented custom text and background color preferences from working in rich text mode
• Add protections to avoid crashing on some malformed server responses
• Fix a bug where only the first paragraph was styled with e.g. multi-paragraph blockquote
• Fix a bug introduced in 3.3.1 that caused image uploads to Movable Type to produce invalid URLs
• Fix handling of Tumblr downtime to be more reliable and convey message to user
• Various bug-fixes to rich mode undo behavior

Enjoy!

This release features a brand-new option to switch post editor documents into “Full-Screen” mode for more focused writing. In full-screen mode, the window is expanded to take up the entire space of the screen, and the menu bar is hidden from view.

Other changes include an option to speak the text of the active document, using Mac OS X’s increasingly awesome built-in speech synthesis, a preference for controlling font size in the main window, and a number of other enhancements and bug fixes.

• New full-screen mode option for post editor windows
• Now supports speaking the text in post editor
• Supports Mac OS X text transformation in post editor
• Added server-side text filter selection for Squarespace
• Add Search/Replace functionality to preview template editor
• Preferences changes
  • Add preference to adjust font size of main window UI
  • Change name of “Attribution” section to “Quick Posts”
  • Support preview of Quick Post HTML defaults
• Bug Fixes
  • Restore functionality of printing from rich text mode
  • Fix rare crash when authenticating Blogger blogs
  • Fix MetaWeblog image uploads to avoid putting / character before file name
  • In rich mode, avoid styling the following paragraph when entire target paragraph is selected
  • In rich mode, improve undo to avoid undoing typing done immediately before a paste
  • Disable “smart” copy & paste in HTML code editor

Enjoy the release and have a great weekend!