MarsEdit 4 Is Here
December 5th, 2017Big news today: MarsEdit 4 is out of beta and available for download from the MarsEdit home page and the Mac App Store. This marks the end of a long development period spanning seven years, so it’s a great personal relief to me to finally release it. I hope you enjoy it.
MarsEdit 4 brings major improvements to the app including a refined new look, enhanced WordPress support, rich and plain text editor improvements, automatic preview template generation, and much more. Read more here:
MarsEdit 4 also brings a new sales approach that aims to unify the trial, purchase, and upgrade experience between the Mac App Store and direct-licensed versions of the app. The app is free to download and can be used full-featured for a 14 day trial period.
After the trial expires, all features of the app continue to work except for actions that update published content on the web. This ensures that all of MarsEdit’s powerful offline features, including download/archiving of posts, can be used in perpetuity for free.
Anybody who purchased MarsEdit 3 on June 1, 2017, or later, is entitled to a free update to MarsEdit 4. Anybody who purchased MarsEdit 3 earlier than June 1 is entitled to a discounted $24.95 upgrade. This applies to Mac App Store users as well! Because MarsEdit 4 embraces the Mac App Store’s in-app purchase model, the app can use a downloaded copy of MarsEdit 3 to validate a discounted or free upgrade to MarEdit 4, as appropriate.
There’s a lot to say about MarsEdit 4 and I’ll talk more about the improvements in separate blog posts after the dust settles. In the mean time, I hope you download the app, enjoy the work I’ve done, and if you’re feeling generous, help spread the word about the release.
Thanks!
December 5th, 2017 at 8:54 pm
Wait a long time, finally launched MarsEdit 4!
I have already purchased it, my favorite blogging tool, thank you.
December 5th, 2017 at 11:03 pm
Thank you, Pseric!
December 6th, 2017 at 10:50 am
Congrats on the launch! And I can’t thank you enough for supporting WordPress featured images. Game changer for me.
December 6th, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Thank you so much for this. I am delighted to have the opportunity to send you money for something that I’ve been relying on for years.
I do have a question about my Local Drafts. With MarsEdit 3, I had been synching them via Dropbox between my Macs. Even if I can no longer sync them, is there a way in which I can import them to MarsEdit 4 (which does not appear to have found them).
December 6th, 2017 at 1:58 pm
Thanks @Jon!
@Jeffrey – thanks as well for the kind words. As for the local drafts, the Dropbox trick probably just threw off MarsEdit’s efforts to “migrate” the old MarsEdit 3 content. You should be able to manually copy them over into the new MarsEdit4 data folder. Hold the option key while selecting Help -> Open MarsEdit Data Folder from MarsEdit 4, then quit MarsEdit before adding any content to the folder, and relaunch.
The Dropbox trick will probably continue to work in MarsEdit 4 if you set it up again. I hesitate to endorse this because MarsEdit doesn’t do anything special to ensure this will work well. I hope to support a full-fledged draft syncing solution at some point.
December 7th, 2017 at 5:31 am
I haven’t upgraded yet. I don’t see compelling reasons in the description of the new version so I’d like to hear more about the improvements in MarsEdit 4 and look forward to the blog posts about these.
December 11th, 2017 at 3:09 pm
Am I reading this post correctly? I have a version of Mars Edit 3 that I purchased through the web. Does this mean I can download Mars Edit 4 from Apple’s App Store and still get the upgrade pricing?
The main reason why I ask is I’m trying to do just that, but the screen to do it has been trying to contact the Mac App Store for a good ten minutes now.
December 11th, 2017 at 3:26 pm
Hi Jim – sorry, you’ve read it almost 100% correctly, but the rub is that you can only upgrade at a discount in the App Store if the copy of the app you are upgrading from is also from the App Store. For direct purchase apps I am offering upgrade pricing, but it has to be purchased as a license through the Red Sweater Store, using your MarsEdit 3 license to unlock the discount:
https://red-sweater.com/store/
The perpetual hanging problem you’re seeing is a bug in MarsEdit when you try to validate an app that is not qualified because its not from the App Store. I am planning to fix that, at least, in the next update to MarsEdit for the Mac App Store.