MarsEdit 3 Is Here

May 4th, 2010

MarsEdit 3 is available now.

Read the MarsEdit 3 Press Release

As you can imagine, I get a lot of feedback about MarsEdit. People tend to be head over heels in love with the application, so most of it is extremely positive. Nonetheless, there are certain persistent requests that I have received over the years. It’s extremely common for people to request the following features

  • “WYSIWYG” rich text editing
  • Support for WordPress Pages and Custom Fields
  • Improved HTML syntax highlighting
  • Integration with iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom
  • Scheduled media attachments

MarsEdit 3 is my answer to all of those requests. Finally.

Download a copy, and enjoy.

So now that 3.0 is out of the way, I suppose I will just kick back and relax. Hah! The most exciting thing about clearing those high level feature requests off the table is it sets the stage for the next round of refinements. There’s a lot of stuff already in progress that I am excited to share with you in the coming months.

I plan for the future of all my products by consolidating user feedback and balancing it against my own personal vision for the application. I’ve got plenty of ideas for MarsEdit on the Mac, as well as on … other platforms.

MarsEdit 3 is a new foundation for developing even more enhancements on the Mac version, but it also includes a lot of “behind the scenes” structural changes that will make it easier for me to build e.g. an iPad version.

It’s going to be an exciting year.

 

52 Responses to “MarsEdit 3 Is Here”

  1. Jan Erik Moström Says:

    The difficult question is: should I upgrade before even launching MarsEdit … or should I actually try it first. Hmmm.

    I hope you doesn’t get too swamped with work the rest of the week :)

  2. Paul Jacobson Says:

    Congrats on rolling out the final release. Does that mean we can now talk publicly about all the cool features? Speaking of cool features, I didn’t even realise there is Lightroom support too!

  3. haineux Says:

    Congrats! Now you can integrate Kant Generator Pro functionality, FOR THE WIN.

  4. Kirby Turner Says:

    Woohoo! I can’t wait to start using Version 3. Congratulations on the new release.

  5. Mike Rohde Says:

    Congrats Daniel! I’m stoked to grab a copy of version 3. I’m proud of you dude! :-)

  6. Simon Wolf Says:

    Congratulation Daniel, great work.

  7. Waldo Says:

    Congratulations, Daniel! I’ve been eagerly awaiting this.

  8. John Brayton Says:

    Congratulations on the major release, Daniel. Looks awesome!

  9. AaronS Says:

    Congratulations on the release!

  10. konrad. Says:

    Congratulations on the major release! Seems to be awesome, even though I feel like some improvements are still missing… But before coming to that, I should probably give it a go for a couple of days first.

  11. Bradley MacDonald Says:

    Great work Dan. Mars Edit is one of my favorite tools and it keeps getting better.
    I noted the release here
    http://functionswitch.net/content/marsedit-3
    Looking forward to a full review soon.

  12. Shawn Blanc Says:

    Dan the man! MarsEdit 3 is one of my most beloved pieces of software. Congratulations on a fantastic update to an already fantastic app.

    Keep up the good work (right after you take a much-needed vacation).

  13. Mike Cohen Says:

    I love it! I just updated. Now I want an iPad version :)

  14. Julik Says:

    10.6 only? Well, dunno what to say. Was it really that necessary?

  15. leafy Says:

    Will it be possible for MarEdit to honor system Socks settings? I am presently in China, where most “libral” services are blocked (plurk, facebook, blogspot). Hopefully it can use my local SOCKS5 tunnel to access my blog on blogspot.

    Cheers,

  16. Derik Says:

    Congratulations Dan. This version is truly an achievement you should be proud of.

  17. Rob Fahrni Says:

    Congratulations Daniel! w00t!

  18. wesley Says:

    ola pesoa tudo bem com vc sewis

  19. Nicolas Says:

    Congratulations! MarsEdit 3 rocks the Mac! :)

  20. Pedro Says:

    Well done. Purchased.

  21. Ryan Says:

    Doesn’t work – still showing HTML tags, no WYSIWYG even though I told it to use WYSIWYG when it asked. Tried fiddling with settings. Am I supposed to delete my old blog or something??

  22. Ryan Says:

    Had to delete old blog to make it work, but got it working.

  23. Ben Cox Says:

    Sorry, I have to give MarsEdit 3 a one star review because it’s not available on the Kindle.

  24. Ronald Huereca Says:

    @Ben,
    Please say that was a joke.

  25. Scott Says:

    I own a copy of MarsEdit version 2, but I haven’t gotten around to installing it on my new machine. This reminded me to do that, but then I failed to find a download link to the old version. Where should users still using old version go to download them?

  26. Ben Cox Says:

    @Ronald,
    Not to worry.

  27. Laurence Koret Says:

    Daniel,

    Congratulations on the launch! MarsEdit 3 is even better and the new icon is amazing!

  28. Frank Says:

    I’ve been using ecto for years. Is there a side by side comparison available that would help me decide if MarsEdit is for me.

    Thanks

  29. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Thanks for the feedback, everybody! Let me just rely to a few issues that I think will be of interest to lots of other readers:

    @Julik – Was it necessary to require 10.6? It was a difficult decision to make but I am happy with it. It allowed me to start leveraging the improved system resources for application developers, that are only available in 10.6. I know it is sad for some folks who have not yet updated to 10.6, but I think it will pay dividends down the road with more updates and more features that will please everybody once they are able to catch up to 10.6.

    @leafy – MarsEdit does support and respect system SOCKS settings. I know we settled this in email but for the benefit of other readers, the issue here turned out to be an auto-detection problem with Blogger, not a SOCKS issue.

    @Ryan – The issue you observed is new to me. I’m not sure what was going on, but I’m glad that deleting and re-adding the blog cleared it up. I’ll keep my ears open for similar experiences.

    @Scott – MarsEdit 2.4.2 is available for download here:

    http://red-sweater.com/marsedit/MarsEdit2.4.2.zip

    It would be nice to continue to list a link to it but obviously I want to prioritize linking to the newest version.

    @Frank – I don’t have a feature comparison chart. In a nutshell this 3.0 release brings a lot of features that have long been observed as missing from MarsEdit when compared to ecto. In particular: scheduled image uploads, and WYSIWYG editing. I would recommend downloading MarsEdit and giving it a spin. There’s a 30 day trial and you should start to get a feeling for whether it offers you a better or worse experience than ecto pretty quickly.

  30. Frank Says:

    Thank you Daniel, I will do that.

  31. ScienceMan Says:

    Hey — can everyone please send the message to Apple’s WikiServer team that it is *way way* past time that they supported the newMediaObject methos for metaWeblog-type posts in their Mac OS X Server wiki server? It’s almost been 2 years since this shortcoming was raised in the wikiserver forums, and without this capability, useful tools like MarsEdit are of no use at all for posting anything except plain text blog entries to Apple’s wikiserver.

    Also, I can find no good documentation for using the AtomPub type of posting method with Apple’s WikiServer either. There are lots of hints that it should work, but all I can make work are the RPC2 (metaWeblog) style posts, which as I said above, appear to be limited to text-only entries.

  32. Andy Lee Says:

    Congratulations, Daniel! I look forward to trying out the new version.

  33. Bill Says:

    Love the new version. Lightroom integration really sealed the deal. Thanks and congratulations on the new version.

  34. Brian Says:

    Congrats on the release!

  35. Jeremy Says:

    Can’t wait to try it. Well done.

  36. Nelson Says:

    I’m giving MarsEdit a try for the next month, but from what I can already see, it pleases me. Integration with Textmate is essential.

    Knowing that you are at the very least thinking of an iPad version is also something that really appeals to me. I’m looking to go very mobile and the iPad is something that is of great interest to me. But I need to be able to write with it and now, there are not a lot of really useful tools for that. You coming up with an iPad version of MarsEdit will seal the deal for me.

    Thanks for that great piece of software!

  37. Khürt Williams Says:

    I’ve been using MarsEdit since before version 2. How is it I find out about a major update via Ars Technica?

  38. Marcus K Says:

    Didn’t even tried the trial, bought an upgrade right away.

  39. Paul Hoffman Says:

    What the heck is the policy on upgrades? I see *nothing* on the web site indicating that there is a charge for this upgrade (which I have now installed), but Macintouch is saying that it is $14.95.

  40. Andy Lee Says:

    @Paul Hoffman:

    Where are you looking? At http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/ I see “Buy now for only $39.95. Upgrade from a previous version for $14.95.” But maybe it wasn’t there before and Daniel only just noticed the omission.

  41. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    @Paul Hoffman – I am also curious where you expect to see it but it’s omitted? The location Andy alludes to has listed it correctly from the start. When you add to cart in the store it lists the price differently if you click “I am upgrading from an earlier version.” I want to make it more clear, so please help me understand where it’s missing the required information.

  42. Paul Hoffman Says:

    Whoops. Yes, it is clear on the main page, and I missed it. I didn’t see prices on the store page; I now see that you only see them when you “add to cart”. That isn’t a great interface (I want prices before I add to cart), but once I do, it is clearly there.

    Registered!

  43. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    @Paul I agree I need to work on the store UI. I recently revamped it to achieve one goal: decluttering and encapsulating an overwhelming amount of information. Clearly that was at the expense of showing … well … information :) I need to come up with a compromise that allows all the products to be shown along with the most meaningful information to users, before they add to cart.

  44. Christian Says:

    RAM consumption becomes excessive after publishing a post.

  45. Al Jigen Billings Says:

    I notice that there are some bugs to be worked out.

    It isn’t visible how to switch between HTML and WYSIWYG modes.

    If I am in HTML mode, unlike version 2, and I hit enter, it doesn’t do line-breaks (because it is simple HTML, I assume) but if I paste content from a web page in, all of the line-breaks (paragraphs, actually) from the web page are preserved in final copy even though the HTML doesn’t actually show up in the editor, just pure text. This makes it rather frustrating if you’re writing a piece and post something in as I have some non-explicit tagging going on that I can’t edit yet I have to manually add to everything.

    I wish that there was a plain text mode that would assume, for preview, that the post was going to be processed by my blogs processing of a normal text entry. This was never a problem in version 2.

  46. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    @Christian – I’ve followed up by email to track in support. I don’t know of any RAM issues but maybe you can help me track it down.

    @Al Jigen Billings – the mechanics of how plain text mode works should be largely unchanged from version 2. I’m following up with you by email so I can track your issues in my support system.

    Everybody – I appreciate the comments! But if you have discovered an issue or want to make a feature request it’s a lot better to direct the feedback directly to support@red-sweater.com, so I can track the request and follow up with you for more information.

  47. James Randall Says:

    Kudos on a great update, really nice work. My only criticism is that I preferred the old icon – the new one feels a little insubstantial to me. But thats just me picking at straws.

  48. manuti Says:

    what a pity, my old powerbook 12″ 1GHz never enjoy with this.

  49. Marx Colcannon Says:

    Is anyone else having problems with this release? I like all the new features but icons disappear, and the media editor (while more robust) doesn’t seem to actually work.

    And I agree with above, the new icon looks kind of amateurish.

  50. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    @Marx It’s easier for me to follow up with you about problems you are having with the release by email, but the email address you used here doesn’t seem to be valid.

    It sounds like your copy of MarsEdit could be corrupted, you might start by trying to redownload the application. If you are still having trouble please contact me by email or follow up in the Red Sweater Forums where it’s easier to manage the problem solving dialogue:

    http://www.red-sweater.com/support/

    Thanks for giving MarsEdit a try,
    Daniel

  51. slashj Says:

    Buggy.
    At least when publishing to Tumblr.
    1) Formatting doesn’t stick
    2) kept asking for my login details when they are correct
    3) would not even publish now.

    It’s seems a nice WYSIWYG editor but how do you change the numbering levels?
    It can go deeper, but how do you go shallower?

  52. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    @slashj I have responded to you by email to follow up on the issues you’re running into. It sounds like if you are not able to log in that could be the core problem. We’ll follow up by email to get things ironed out.

    As for the list-depth, it could be a lot more obvious but the way to control depth is tab to go deeper, shift-tab to go shallower.

    It seems like this blog entry has lived out its use as an announcement of MarsEdit 3. The comments are turning more and more to technical support, which I’d much prefer be directed to either the forums or to our support email address:

    http://www.red-sweater.com/support/

    I’m closing comments at this point! Thanks for all the feedback above, folks!

    Daniel

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