Suck It Up And Ship

When I introduced the rich HTML editor in MarsEdit 3, I knew there would be some issues. WYSIWYG editing is freaking hard. I don’t pretend to have started out an expert, nor have I become one. I’m getting there, though!

I decided to release MarsEdit 3.0 when I did because of what I refer to lovingly as my “suck it up and ship” mantra. I tell other people all the time that you can’t hoard your work. Sure, putting off the ship date indefinitely will allow you to avoid the embarrassing critiques, the discovery by the public that you are in fact imperfect. But you know what? They never get to try out your app, either.

The customer-developer feedback loop is exceedingly important when it comes to prioritizing bug fixes. The months you spend “perfecting” your stuff will undoubtedly focus on parts of the app that your users don’t even, as it turns out, give a damn about. Get your 1.0 (or 2.0, or 3.1.2) to users as quickly and responsibly as possible, and evaluate the results.

On that note, MarsEdit 3.1.2 is available today, fixing an issue in the rich text editor that, suffice to say, is far more than a “minor glitch.” In a nutshell: if you did a “search and replace” where the replacement text included the search text, the app went into an infinite replacement loop, hung, and required a force-quit.

That is so not Red Sweater. Yuck! I discovered this thanks to my new (as of 3.0) crash reporter that, while providing precious few details about the reason for the force-quits, eventually included key feedback from a user who offered the hints as to what was happening.

I hope this release cuts down dramatically on the number of mysterious, context-free crash reports. There are some other goodies, too:

MarsEdit 3.1.2

Fixes for issues with Find/Replace in the rich editor

Fix a potential hang when doing replace all

Fix “Use Selection for Find” menu item

Fix behavior of “Replace All” when limiting to selected text

Fix a bug that prevented “None” from sticking as preview filter choice

Fix a bug that caused wrong alt text to be generated for some uploads

Prevent ugly clipping of font descenders e.g. on lower case “g” in Media Manager

Here’s to the next imperfect release!