Tumblr Comes Through

December 4th, 2008

Shortly after I blogged about the shortcomings of Tumblr’s API, Marco Arment of Tumblr commented on the post and expressed his sincere desire to set things right.

We got to chatting almost immediately, and the results were stunning. Marco made a round of changes in Tumblr as I experimented with the new features via MarsEdit. In the end, Marco was able to fix all of the critical shortcomings in the blog service’s interface, and added some additional goodies to boot.

Today, Marco made the revisions public, as announced on the Tumblr staff blog. I’m sure I’ll find suggestions and requests to pass along in the future, but the Tumblr API is now capable of providing a great user experience from desktop applications such as MarsEdit.

Which begs the question, when will MarsEdit be taking advantage of these new frills? I am making it a priority to release an update to MarsEdit as soon as possible with basic text entry support for Tumblr. I adjusted my feature planning a bit because I know how excited Tumblr users are to get their hands on something soon.

I expect MarsEdit 2.3 to feature this initial Tumblr support, and I’ll be working to get that released as soon as possible.

11 Responses to “Tumblr Comes Through”

  1. Chris Campbell Says:

    This is great news, Daniel, and I look forward to Tumbling with MarsEdit! Thanks for this.

  2. Doug Says:

    This is the one thing I’ve been waiting to buy MarsEdit for (well, when there’s Tumblr picture posting)! Yahoo!

  3. Stephen W. Carson Says:

    I am a MarsEdit user and was one of the ones to request Tumblr support. Many things to Daniel Jalkut for his persistence on this and to Marco Arment and the Tumblr team for adding the crucial API support.

    I, for one, had asked that MarsEdit simply get text posting support to begin with.

    Here is how key MarsEdit is to me as a blogger… I am part of a couple group blogs as well as having my own personal blog. It took a little while for me to realize but this is the reality: Those blogs that I can post on using MarsEdit gets posts from me, those that I can’t post on with MarsEdit pretty much don’t.

  4. Joerg Battermann Says:

    Finally! Awesome! Really looking forward to this… :)

  5. Joel Says:

    It’s ironic. On Tuesday, December 2, I began migrating my Tumblr blog over to a WordPress blog, mainly because of my need for MarsEdit support. I’ll probably continue the move, but I wish Tumblr well, and hope my feedback to them was helpful in their decision to support the APIs MarsEdit needs. Of course I’ll use MarsEdit more than ever, now that it works with all my blogs!

    (All your blogs are belong to MarsEdit:-)

  6. Paul Jacobson Says:

    Looking forward to the new version. I play with my tumblelog on and off and having MarsEdit support helps even as I try find a place for my tumblelog in the overall scheme of things.

  7. kristof Says:

    Is there online documentation on the updated API available?

  8. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    kristof: the main Tumblr API documentation page is up to date with the new API changes:

    http://www.tumblr.com/docs/api

  9. John Says:

    Is there any release information about MarsEdit 2.3? I know usually there isn’t much information until the release but I was wondering if there is any timeframe for the release. Thank you.

  10. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Hi John – I don’t have a specific time frame to share. Actually, the development of 2.3 is representative of the exact reason I’m usually hesitant to share publicly the plans I have. I have made a lot of progress with Tumblr support, but in a private beta testing phase some users noticed some serious shortcomings that I’d like to address before I release it publicly.

    So … the answer is … as soon as I can. :) I’m still planning to include Tumblr support in 2.3, so you can probably imagine that it won’t be TERRIBLY long.

    Daniel

  11. Erik Says:

    Great news! Looking forward to tumblr support in MarsEdit. Kudos to you and Marco for turning what could have been a bad thing into a good thing.

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