In my previous post, I expressed excitement over the recent review of MarsEdit 2 in Macworld magazine.

Well, this week is just getting better and better. Today, I learned that Macworld has awarded MarsEdit the prestigious Eddy Award, their annual award to products chosen for their excellence by the editorial staff.

Look at that statue closely, he’s holding a classic Mac. How cute is that?

It probably goes without saying that this kind of recognition is extremely gratifying, and will surely help to fuel another year of hard work on my part. Thanks so much, Macworld, for choosing to recognize my product.

If that wasn’t enough, MacBreak Weekly episode 70 has been released (to the iTunes feed, not updated yet on the web page), and I received some great recognition in this episode from Andy Ihnatko, a well-known and long-time Mac journalist. He is actually trying out MarsEdit himself, but reserving final judgment until he spends more time with it. But he took the opportunity to check out Black Ink, which he selected as his MacBreak Weekly “software pick of the week.” He says Black Ink is “an incredibly Mac-like app. It’s perfect for filling in crossword puzzles.” Thanks, Andy! I appreciate it very much. If you’re interested in hearing all of his comments, be sure to keep listening through 1:21:40.

MarsEdit and Black Ink are making waves this week, and I’m loving the ride!

But on a more gracious note …

MarsEdit is getting a lot of new recognition these days thanks to the hard work I’ve been putting into it, but it’s worth remembering the hard work that Brent Simmons put into the original version. The vast majority of that code is still running today and is the basis on which all of today’s excellence is built. Gus Mueller of Flying Meat also deserves a lot of credit for taking the reins for the 1.1 era of the product’s development history.

And … and … (awards ceremony music starts playing) … thanks to Bryan Bell for helping me to revitalize MarsEdit’s look with a whole new set of toolbar icons. I believe those touches were the icing on the cake for 2.0.

And thanks to all the users who offer nearly-continuous encouragement.

I was thrilled to see that Macworld today posted a review of MarsEdit 2.0. The application earned 4 mice, which for those of you who follow the magazine know, is a pretty great accomplishment. I’m betting that one day I’ll earn all five, but for the time being I’m quite pleased with this achievement.

Lisa Schmeiser, who reviewed the application, did a good job of identifying many of the improvements I made for the 2.0 release, such as built-in Flickr support, and enhanced markup macros. But she also tuned into some of the “soft features” that are not as suited to bullet lists, but nonetheless make a huge impact on users over time. One of these is the “peace of mind” that MarsEdit can provide:

MarsEdit 2.0.4’s big appeal is peace of mind: You can compose posts locally and archive your work. Anyone who’s ever lost a Weblog post owing to a browser freezing or site going down will appreciate this tool.

Ask any Mac software developer you can find, and they’ll attest that getting reviewed by Macworld is one of the things we hope and strive for. It’s a great honor just to get mentioned, but to receive such a positive and thoughtful review really makes my day.

When Leopard was released over a month ago, I proudly announced that Red Sweater’s applications were Leopard ready. Well, it was true, but as I suspect is the case for most software developers, little wrinkles in behavior have slowly shown up as more and more users upgrade to the latest cat.

Today I released two updates to applications that get a bit less attention, but which nonetheless have passionate fans: FastScripts and Clarion. It was thanks to these fans that I discovered and was able to fix a few Leopard-specific issues that they noticed.

FastScripts had a problem with running automator routines. Like, at all. I guess that shows how often I run automator routines myself! From a developer perspective, running Automator Workflows in Leopard is a lot easier than it was in Tiger, and is officially supported by a new AMWorkflow class for Cocoa programmers. Unfortunately, while providing a new and sanctioned method for running these workflows, they simultaneously broke the old technique that I was using for Tiger. Fixed in FastScripts 2.3.6!

Another issue with FastScripts had to do with the order of presentation for the user’s “personal scripts” compared with Apple’s standard scripts (from /Library/Scripts). It’s only natural that users would prefer to see their own scripts appear higher in the menu, since those are probably the ones they’re accessing more frequently. Well, it turns out the placement of these items has just sort of magically fallen the “desired” way for the past 3 major operating system releases. In Leopard, the order of the randomness flip-flopped, and I needed to explicitly ensure that the user’s scripts take priority. Also fixed in FastScripts 2.3.6!

Clarion is an application for studying and drilling yourself on musical interval recognition. It’s a pretty niche market, but it has a pretty nifty live piano keyboard view that I’m pretty proud of. While you’re contemplating the sounds of the pitches you are being quizzed on, you can tinker around on the piano keyboard to give yourself visual and audio clues as to what the interval might be. Unfortunately, some changes in CoreAudio on Leopard revealed a bug in my code for playing these notes. The end result? On Leopard any key you pressed would keep playing the sound even after you release the key. Nightmare! Fixed in Clarion 2.0.1.

If you’re running Leopard and noticing any glitches in my products, please let me know so I can get to the bottom of them. Right now I have only one outstanding issue, which is a text-rendering problem in MarsEdit, when opening existing posts for editing. Unfortunately I can’t find anything wrong with my behavior, so I’m also sort of quietly hoping for a fix from Apple in 10.5.2.

Michael Mistretta over at MacApper has posted a review of MarsEdit 2.

Before I heard about MarsEdit, I would have all my blogs in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar, and I would have to click each one and log in, in order to see if there were any new posts written, or if I wanted to edit something. Now, I am just a click away from MarsEdit, where I can check and edit all of my blogs at once.

Thanks for taking the time to share your extensive thoughts, Michael! I think that paragraph sums up the “life changing” nature of MarsEdit for bloggers.