I’ve just updated my Black Ink crossword solving app to version 1.1, bringing a dramatically improved printout quality, and a host of other small improvements:

Black Ink 1.1

• Dramatically improved puzzle printing quality
• Improved highlighting of active clue in clue list
• Fix for crashing scenario when migrating preferences to a new Mac
• Improved reliability of puzzle downloads
• Fix some bugs with timer restarting after pausing
• Updated default puzzle sources
  • New: Boston Globe Sunday
  • New: Little Rock Daily Record
  • Removed: Washington Post Sunday

It turns out printing is one of those features you can really start to obsess on. I am very happy with the improvements that have been made for 1.1, but just getting under the hood and having my hands dirty has taught me so much about how it can be improved even more.

Exactly what has gotten better with printing? For starters, the application does a better job of remembering your printing options (selectable from the Page Setup dialog). But the real joy is in the improved quality of the paper (or PDF) printouts you generate. The output is now much sharper and closer to “typesetting quality.” Finally, the layout of the clues list has been revised to offer more readable, flowing text that fills the width of the page more naturally.

For future updates, I’m looking forward to offering further refinements. At the top of my list is a preference for “handedness,” so you can print the puzzle grid at the appropriate side of the clues for your preferred solving hand. I also hope to increase the flexibility of clue and grid sizing, so that users with better or worse vision can get the most out of the printout feature.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

Update: Round version numbers are boring, right? If you already downloaded 1.1 be sure to grab the 1.1.1 update which fixes a really annoying issue with the very printing improvements I’ve highlighted here. In the hubbub of getting these new features in, I neglected to notice that for users who haven’t been incrementally using my private beta builds, the printing options would have been set to unfortunate default settings, which caused a nearly blank printout page :)

Many thanks to David Brown for spotting this and letting me know in the comments below.

Manton and I are still at it. We’ve heard the feedback, some of it lukewarm, some of it intentionally discouraging, but most of it extremely enthusiastic.

We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of episode 3, where we talk about WWDC, MobileMe, iPhone 3G, and a bunch of relatively unrelated stuff.

Check us out!

A few releases back, WordPress had a vulnerability that many spam injection … bastards … took advantage of. I am not too proud to admit that I was myself a victim of this vulnerability, even though I update pretty religiously to the latest release of WordPress.

I noticed over the past few weeks that even though I had updated to the latest WordPress release, which is supposed to be free of vulnerabilities, I was repeatedly having spam links injected into the footer.php file in my theme. Frustrated, I went to some of my friends on the WordPress team, and they pointed me at a great article from Donncha O Caoimh:

Unfortunately for some who did upgrade, it was too late. The hacker slimeballs may have known about the security issues before we did and went about their merry way breaking into blogs and websites, grabbing usernames and passwords, and planting backdoor scripts to log them in again at a later date.

In this article, Donncha gives an extremely thorough and authoritative treatment of the problem. If you have been the victim of this nasty attack, or even if you don’t know whether you have, it would be worthwhile to review the article and see how your WordPress install stands up to the scrutiny suggested there.

MarsEdit 2.1.4 is now available for download. I’ve got some much bigger changes on the way for MarsEdit 2.2, but these are some short-term fixes I wanted to get out even sooner:

MarsEdit 2.1.4

• Add a dock menu item for easily starting a new post
• Support uploading to specific Picasa album for Blogger users
• Prevent dragging a URL to preview window from loading that URL
• Fix display of tags in main window preview
• Safeguard against bad URLs that could cause a crash when refreshing

If you’re a Blogger user and want to take advantage of the new “specific album” feature, just type in the name of the album in the Media Manager’s Upload pane, where it says “in”.

Enjoy – and as always, let me know if you spot any problems!