Shawn Blanc has posted his latest interview, and I’m honored to say that it is with me! Shawn digs into the history of Red Sweater Software, my early years as a programmer, and a host of other issues, including this roundup of why MarsEdit doesn’t yet support WYSIWYG editing:

“There are a list of classic things that are wrong with WYSIWYG editors. They over-promise and under-deliver. They’re not actually that easy to use. They mess up your HTML, and often outright eliminate content. I don’t want to make any of those mistakes. That’s what makes the feature hard, and that’s the reason users haven’t seen it yet in MarsEdit.”

Shawn has a great knack for interviews. Like many web-based dialogues, the actual communication takes place via email. But unlike so many where the questions are drawn up ahead of time and then answered in one fell swoop, Shawn’s interviews take place organically, as an in-person conversation would.

The process of responding to dozens of emails back and forth takes time – over 2 weeks I think we spent. But the end result is obviously a lot more interactive, and covers a lot more territory than one would cover by attempting to guess all the questions up front.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to chat with me, Shawn.

I often explain the benefits of MarsEdit starting with a premise that editing on the desktop beats editing in a web browser. I believe this to be true even when the playing field is level, and web interfaces are operating at their best. Unfortunately, thanks to a large number of ever-changing browser environments, web interfaces frequently don’t operate at their best. This is part of the nature of that beast. Often, web-based editors provide more frustration than convenience.

Recently there has been an increase of new MarsEdit buyers who cite as their motivation a frustration with the WordPress web editor. I respect and admire the WordPress team. In fact, their web interface is among the best out there. But even in the best of circumstances, it’s hard to compete with the usability of a desktop app. And when something goes bad, it becomes downright impossible.

Currently the situation is especially bad for people who use WordPress with Safari. For whatever reason these two pieces of software have fallen slightly out of accord. It’s common to hear tales of people who use Safari for “everything but WordPress.” In short, WordPress has a reputation for messing up or even eliminating parts of your post when using the web-based editor in Safari. I know, because I see the comments of my customers and would-be customers on the web. There is a chorus of confirmation for this problem.

I look forward to WordPress and Safari ironing out their differences. I don’t relish earning customers purely out of frustration with the competition. I prefer to attract customers by exceeding baseline functionality than by my competitors failing to meet it. But if you’re tired of doing battle with the WordPress editor in Safari, or any other browser for that matter, it’s a good time to remember that MarsEdit is here for you.

I welcome those users who arrive out of desperation, and am hopeful they will find much more than baseline functionality to be delighted with in MarsEdit.

Update: Lloyd Budd, who is the quality lead for WordPress, has coincidentally written today on the very subject of Safari and WordPress. He predicts that major improvements are in store with WordPress 2.5:

“With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.”

This is great news for everybody. I think your experience will be greater still in MarsEdit, but happy WordPress customers are great for the blogging industry in general.

Update 2: For some reason this post ended up with comments disabled. I don’t know yet if it’s a bug in MarsEdit, WordPress, or the author. I have enabled them, now. I welcome your opinions!

Twitter, for those of you haven’t heard, is an online communication system where users broadcast their thoughts, feelings, rants, and rambles to the world. Or more precisely, to a subset of the world that wants to listen, and to anybody who stumbles upon such a result in Google. You can follow my tweets if you like; I’m danielpunkass on the service.

Twitter is an amazingly successful service in spite of a never-ending list of negatives thrown out both by people who do and don’t use it. It’s a waste of time. It’s flakey and the servers can’t handle the load. It can’t scale. It’s distracting. People use it to chat too much. People use it to rant too much. Nobody will follow me because I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know who to follow. I just don’t get it. Why would anybody want to do that?

And in spite of all this negativity, people are still using it. Because there are a lot of positives, as well. It’s a way to stay in touch. You learn more personal details about the people you admire. You have nearly instant access to a wide group of friends at once. You have an outlet for your quippy remarks. You make new friends you wouldn’t have otherwise made. It’s something to be a part of.

What I realized today is that as an indie business on the web, there is one incredible payoff to Twitter that doesn’t even require your participation for you to benefit: Twitter is fueling word of mouth marketing. Especially for services, products, and gizmos you can buy online.

I use a service called Terraminds to monitor several important keywords in public tweets across the entire system. What this means is that for instance, if somebody I don’t even know in Germany mentions MarsEdit in a tweet to a friend, I see it. Kind of creepy, huh?

When I see these mentions, I sometimes just move along. But other times, the tone of message catches my interest, so I follow up by clicking on the account of the other person, and discover the tweet that prompted such an out-of-the-blue MarsEdit mention. Often, it’s something about the flakiness of the web interfaces for a blogging system, or an outright request from a person to his or her peers: “Which blog editor for Mac? k thx bye.”

The point, to me, is that the kinds of conversation being facilitated by Twitter are exactly the kinds of talk that foster product endorsements, explicit and otherwise. While publicly blogging your affection for a product takes some deliberation and determination, it’s easy as heck to quip “FastScripts, FTW!” in a moment of delight, or “I’m really digging the new FlickrExport” as you put a product through its paces. Spontaneous declarations of truth are a major part of Twitter culture, and this works perfectly for word of mouth marketing.

You, the people who follow you, and the people you follow form a sort of virtual water cooler that is gigantic and more efficient for casual product endorsement than any other system I can recall or imagine. The fact that some of the people are your friends, and some are just “famous people” whose opinions you admire, creates a perfect storm for stimulating and validating such endorsements. When somebody you respect drops hints that they’re using a particular software or service, you’re likely to take notice. And when you try it and like it, you’ll naturally pay the favor back by tweeting the good news to all of your friends, too.

Is Twitter a waste of time? It might turn out to be the single best marketing aid an online business could ask for, so maybe it deserves to have a little time wasted on it. Like this post? Be sure to tell all your friends on Twitter! :)

MarsEdit has a little shortcoming that can cause a vexing situation from time to time. It takes what you type or paste into it a bit too literally. So if you flub up at the keyboard and make some wacky keystrokes, you might end up with a weird “invisible character” in your blog post. What happens on most systems when you then go to publish, is you get a very unfortunate error message in return.

“Parse Error. Not well formed.” How lovely!

These tricky characters are especially sinister because you can almost never see them. When you end up with one of these bad boys in your post, the only hint you might get is if you are moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, you might see it “hiccup” a second while it stops on the invisible character.

I’m sure there are a lot of different names for these unwelcome guests in text, but I like the one the folks at Bare Bones use: “gremlins”. Their fine editor, BBEdit, has a dedicated tool just for rooting these suckers and either eliminating them or making them visible: Zap Gremlins.

I’d like to add something similar to MarsEdit, so I can spare users the pain of having to figure this out when run into an error dialog such as the one above. But in the meantime, I’ve been resorting to handling the customer support inquiries by myself taking the user’s example text into BBEdit and looking for gremlins. Then I can point out the location of the offending character to the user, they backspace it out of existence, and life goes on.

As relatively painless as BBEdit’s function makes the task, it’s not really perfectly suited to what I need. It’s more aimed at eliminating the beasts than examining them. Whereas I want as much information as I can get about them, so I can effectively communicate to the user (and also so I can catalog what types of characters users are running into trouble with).

Thanks to AppleScript support for the Zap Gremlins function, I was able to whip up a pretty handy script to streamline this operation. Find Gremlins takes the text contents of the clipboard, runs Zap Gremlins on it to find the gremlins, and then displays a summary of what it knows about them.

It gives me all the details I would normally have to work hard to figure out. What is the character? Where is it exactly, and most importantly of all, shows the character in context, replaced by a bullet for easy visibility. Although adding the text to a BBEdit document and manually examining the gremlins wasn’t too much of a time waster, it was still a bit boring and tedious.

I realize finding gremlins in the clipboard text will be useful to approximately 0% of you, but I thought it was a good opportunity to demonstrate how AppleScript support for the features of an application can turn out to serve incredibly particular needs. Thanks, Bare Bones! Zap Gremlins is saving me time, and helping me get my customers back to blogging in comfort.

Update: Thanks to reader Daniel Blanken who noticed a bug in the script that prevented it from finding gremlins very close to the beginning or ends of the selected text. I’ve updated the script with his fixes.