MarsEdit Meets Tumblr

February 27th, 2009

Many of you have been waiting patiently for MarsEdit 2.3, featuring support for Tumblr. Today, I’m happy to release a public beta with these updates. Please feel free to download and give it a try! I would also value your feedback on what I’ve done so far.

Click Here To Download MarsEdit 2.3 Public Beta

Special note for current MarsEdit users: It’s a good idea to make a backup of your current MarsEdit Application Support folder. You’ll find it in your home directory at:

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

For this initial Tumblr support, I have only endeavored to support the Text, Quote, Photo, Link, and Chat post types. Audio and video are on the list for a future enhancement.

While the emphasis of this release is on Tumblr, there are a few goodies that will benefit those of you who are using MarsEdit on other blog systems as well:

  • Opening the media manager is now much faster with lots of photos
  • Improved usability and design of the Technorati Tags editor
  • Improved weblog Favicon detection

Tumblr Caveats

I think there is enough here to get people excited about using MarsEdit for Tumblr, and hopefully you won’t run in to many pitfalls. But there are a few things that I already know are working less than perfectly.

  • Autodetection of weblog settings fails if you host on a custom domain name. To work around this, give MarsEdit your tumblr-based URL, e.g. “http://marsedit.tumblr.com/”. I am working with the Tumblr folks to see if we can facilitate a way for MarsEdit to autodetect settings from a custom domain name.
  • Fixed in 2.3b15: Post options such as selecting between Markdown and HTML , and setting whether a post is public or private, are not yet supported. I hope to support these in an update sometime after 2.3 ships.
  • Fixed in 2.3b15: Only the first tumblelog for an account can be edited with MarsEdit. The Tumblr API has come a long way in recent months, but it is missing the capacity to specify a particular blog to edit when submitting or editing a post.

Have Fun And Keep In Touch

I hope you’ll give this new release of MarsEdit a try, and take the time to send me your feedback if you’ve got it. I’m not aiming for perfection with 2.3, but usable and lovable would be a good start. I appreciate your help in getting us there!

12 Responses to “MarsEdit Meets Tumblr”

  1. Joachim Bengtsson Says:

    Thank you! :) I’ve been thinking about setting up a blog on my local server, to e g get to use MarsEdit, but tumblr’s so convenient it just never happened!

    Btw, your link says “Beta 1” but the download says “b13”.

  2. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Thanks, Joachim. I actually am referring to this as “Public Beta 1” … but who knows, there might not be a public beta 2, so I changed the heading to just say “public beta.” :)

  3. Steamshift Says:

    This one:-

    “Only the first tumblelog for an account can be edited with MarsEdit. The Tumblr API has come a long way in recent months, but it is missing the capacity to specify a particular blog to edit when submitting or editing a post.”

    is a killer for me … I’m hoping you’re in conversation with the folks at Tumblr to resolve this one?

  4. Chris Miner Says:

    Since you have a new version, I thought I’d give it another try. Is there a technical reason that MarsEdit (still) doesn’t support pasting an image from the clipboard into the Media Manager? Without this simple feature one can’t select the image well and hit cmd-p in order to include a screen shot. One has to take the rather cumbersome route of first saving it to disk and then loading it from disk and then deleting it from disk.

  5. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Steamshift: I am indeed in contact with Tumblr about the inability to edit more than one blog. I’m hoping for a pretty quick turnaround on that.

    Chris: I’m sorry that feature is still missing. There isn’t a technical reason for it, no. It just hasn’t happened yet. Unfortunately, the list of great enhancements is much longer than I can ever get done for a single update, so I have to pick and choose and get something out the door.

    Daniel

  6. Michael J. Says:

    This is great. I appreciate the cooperation you and Tumblr folks pulled off. A slow start but seems beneficial to both the companies and the users. Thanks!

  7. Peter Vader Says:

    When your tweet about this came over I had to fight the urge to leave right in the middle of the rock show I was at. As they say on secrettweet – is this wrong?

    Seriously though, thank you! Excited as hell.

  8. Vincent van Wylick Says:

    Hey Daniel,

    I think you also fixed the problem of Marsedit hanging while saving a draft! I have over 500 of them, which I think didn’t help, but really appreciate the upgrade! Thanks again.

    Vincent

  9. Michael Says:

    AWESOME! Thanks So Much.

  10. Kevin Lipe Says:

    The beta is working great for me so far–I didn’t go so far as to overwrite ME 2.2.3 in my Applications folder, but I’ve been using the beta as my main editor since you released it. Very smooth. Just what I’ve been waiting for so I can delete all my “new tumblr post” bookmarklets I made myself.

  11. Dossy Shiobara Says:

    Daniel, is there a changelog that describes the significant changes between 2.2.3 and 2.3? Should I upgrade or just wait until the official release?

  12. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Hi Dossy – basically what I described here covers the changes in 2.3. If you don’t see anything in this post that particularly interests you, I would probably recommend waiting for the official release.

Comments are Closed.

Follow the Conversation

Stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Comments RSS Feed for this entry.