I know this is probably not the best idea for a business blog. I hesitate to express my political beliefs in general, because while I do have strong beliefs of a “liberal” persuasion, I also think that those political beliefs are best kept apart from my business persona. As Red Sweater Software, my job is to make your Mac rock your world. That’s true whether you’re a liberal, conservative, libertarian, or all of the above. I honestly don’t care, and I value and admire my customers from all political persuasions. But that’s software, and that’s business.

As an individual, I have ambitions to make the United States a proud country whose public policy reflects the Americans I know. An overwhelmingly kind and non-violent type of American, who wants to join hands with the rest of the world, instead of raising hands against them.

So many of us, from all political parties, feel this way. We go on about our daily lives, but we are pained by the ways in which our government positions itself as an adversary to the rest of the world. Here’s the deal, world: WE LOVE YOU. We can’t stand what’s going on with our public policy, and we can’t wait for it to change.

Many people like to blame “conservatives” for this negative world impression, but the truth is that many of the so-called conservatives are just as ambitious as I am about building a world-wide family. We’re all in this together, to steal a line from “Brazil.” Let’s not think about whether a conservative or a liberal will fix our problems, let’s think about which person represents the hopeful ambitions of our country.

I personally think that Barack Obama represents our best hope for jumpstarting a change in our relationship with the world. I believe Hillary Clinton is a good person, whose intellect and ambitions are in the best interests of America. But I don’t think she can effect the type of change I need and expect. At this point in our country’s incredibly short yet powerful history, I believe we need to elect a President whose leadership and vision give us a head start in the eyes of the world. A President who causes the world to sit up and acknowledge: “America cares about us.”

I’m ready for the United States of America to take a new leader. A leader who will represent everything hopeful about our unique, positive attitude toward the world. If you’re American, and you’ve got something hopeful to say to the world, I strongly encourage you to consider voting for Barack Obama. If you’re not American, and you’ve got some faith left in us, I strongly encourage you to sit tight and see how much better we can be, when we try.

Update: I have figured out the reason for these mysterious XML-RPC failures. It has to do with a conflict between MarsEdit 2.1 and certain loadable bundles that implement a method with the same name as MarsEdit. In particular, if you are using WriteRoom and installed the “Edit in WriteRoom” bundle, you are likely to see the bug in MarsEdit. Also, older versions of a similar bundle for editing in TextMate would exhibit the same problem.

I’ll be updating MarsEdit ASAP to use a more unique method name to avoid the clash. In the meantime you can work around the problem by disabling this Input Manager.

Original post below:

I released MarsEdit 2.1 last Thursday, and on the whole, reaction has been positive, and people are enjoying the new features!

However, there have been a few hiccups, and I’m working hard on fixing a few issues that people have spotted and reported to me.

The worst of these issues is a mysterious “XML-RPC Response Parsing Failed” error which is provably new to 2.1. If you updated and are suddenly getting these errors, I have to recommend downgrading to 2.0.5 until I can work out the details and fix it. I have received several reports but I’m still hoping this problem is relatively rare. If you need to downgrade:

Download MarsEdit 2.0.5

If you are experiencing problems with MarsEdit’s new tags feature on 10.4, I believe you’ll find the issue fixed in this beta release of MarsEdit 2.1.1:

Download MarsEdit 2.1.1b2

Needless to say, this is not exactly a dream scenario for me. I hate to think of customers updating and encountering errors or bugs. But once the cat is out of the bag, I think the only thing I can do is work as hard I can to get the problems fixed quickly.

I have been looking forward to this for several weeks. Some time ago, Shawn Blanc announced that he would be writing extensive reviews of some of his favorite Mac applications. Much to my delight, MarsEdit was to be among them. It so happened that the timing of his MarsEdit review lined up with when I was planning to release 2.1, so I gave him the heads up and he held off until 2.1 was live.

MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution

What I love about Shawn’s review is the way he zeroes in more on the philosophy and feel of the application, as opposed to merely running down the features list as so many reviews are likely to do. Shawn even did some investigative journalism, contacting MarsEdit’s icon designer, Bryan Bell, and digging up this gem of an artifact from the original design process:

One of the things MarsEdit gets flak for from some potential customers is its lack of a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Usually the people who are most wanting of this feature frankly can’t imagine how it could possibly be absent. On the other hand, the vast majority of people who love MarsEdit and use it daily seem to not care one iota about the feature. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: WYSIWYG editing is in MarsEdit’s future, but I’ll be careful not to violate at all the existing power of MarsEdit’s reliable “what you see is what you send” editor.

Shawn’s review doesn’t ding MarsEdit for its lack of rich editing, but instead emphasizes the value of editing in plain text:

“In all my experience with WYSIWYG editors I have found them a clumsy enemy of fine web typography. Typing a weblog post in a WYSIWYG editor is a bit like laying out a book in Microsoft Word.

…

MarsEdit has combined many of the WYSIWYG concepts and implemented them into the HTML editor making it all very easy to use.”

I really agree with this attitude. Which is not to say I don’t respect people who want WYSIWYG. It’s a great idea and will empower non-technical users to express their thoughts more freely. And that’s part of what MarsEdit is all about. But MarsEdit is also about serious publishing, and if you’re serious, you should consider designing your blog so that the “style” is handled on the server, not in the client. The primary goal of MarsEdit is to quickly and efficiently transmit your thoughts to your blog. And the most efficient way to do that is in plain-text, semantically organized with MarsEdit’s powerful markup macro system.

And … MarsEdit’s WYSIWYG support is gonna kick all kinds of ass.

Fog Creek Software are the makers of the fine FogBugz bug tracking system, which I have started using for managing my own projects. You probably also know one of its founders, Joel Spolsky, as the author of an entertaining and informative blog about programming, and other software business-y stuff.

Today, Fog Creek posted an item to their new network status blog, confessing that 14 users had been overcharged for Copilot in January. Everything’s OK, these users are being refunded for the overcharge. The problem is resolved. And yet, Fog Creek chose to publicize the mistake anyway.

Fog Creek obviously recognizes that you earn the respect of customers when you’re willing to admit to thousands (hundreds of thousands?) that you screwed up, even if only 14 were actually affected.

Bravo, Fog Creek.

The reason I’m blogging this is because, well, I like Fog Creek, but also because I think heaping praise on companies that do the right thing is the best way to encourage other companies to follow suit.