MarsEdit 2.0 has been out for about a month now, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s very gratifying to learn that all the little nuances I thought were important enough to spend time on, are actually being appreciated by tons and tons of users.

First of all I’ve gotten a number of personal notes from people who have either recently discovered or rediscovered the application. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the names of people who have emailed me privately, but some people have taken the liberty of blogging publicly about their decisions. Michael Tsai, editor of About This Particular Macintosh, wrote publicly about his switch to MarsEdit, and it sums up the sentiment nicely:

“For a long time I just didn’t get the point of applications like MarsEdit. I think I understood the arguments for such software, but I didn’t feel a need to actually use it. […] Now I’m hooked. Some things that I thought might be problems ended up being non-issues, and the whole draft-edit-post flow is much smoother than I was expecting.”

The Mac ReviewCast had great things to say about it, declaring it “still the best.” Why, thank you! David Sparks wrote up a text version of his thoughts on the MacSparky blog. I like his assessment of using a web client to manage your blog:

“There really is nothing wrong with that. It is perfectly fine. Of course it is also perfectly fine scrub your floors with a toothbrush and self perform your own dental work. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it is possible.”

Giles Turnbull reviewed MarsEdit 2.0 for Mac User UK, remarking in particular on the value of the Flickr integration:

“This clever combination of local and web-based software working transparently together is what makes MarsEdit so impressive.”

Especially gratifying is the steady stream of comments I receive “off-the-cuff” from users as they buy the product. Around the time I released MarsEdit 2.0, I updated my web store to include a very prominent, easy to use comments field. The comments come directly to my inbox and I get a chance to read them and reply. Most of the comments say something extremely vague yet gratifying, like “I love it!!!” But I’ve also received random song lyrics, poetic quotations, and expressions of affection with unicode glyphs (phew! the unicode support works).

It’s such a relief to not only have MarsEdit 2.0 out there, but to have the public appreciating it. I can tell that by the time 3.0 rolls around there even more users anxiously anticipating the release than there were this time.

Thanks, everybody!

Update: One of the difficulties of a post like this is collecting all the mentions in one place. Well no sooner had I published the post and popped my iPod on than I was treated to another wonderful mention from Leo Laporte on the MacBreak Weekly show:

“The new 2.0 version of MarsEdit has come out, and well, well worth it. […] That’s how I do all my blog posting now, and it’s really increased my output.” (1:09:30)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. MarsEdit will make you a more prolific blogger. I’ve seen it time and time again. I think it reduces the psychological burden of blogging. I frankly can’t believe Leo is posting so much lately, and I’m really glad that MarsEdit is playing an important role.

Side-note: This episode of MacBreak Weekly is sort of an indie-Mac holy grail episode. Great mentions of Stunt Software’s On The Job, and Rogue Amoeba’s Radioshift, as well!

From time to time MarsEdit users ask whether there is or will be any support in the application for “automatic crossposting.” While MarsEdit is great for managing multiple blogs from a single interface, it still requires you to manually open separate windows and “send” the post to each of the blogs you want to publish it on. Some users would like to be able to define a “metablog” in MarsEdit and have posts to that destination simulcast to multiple blogs.

I’m hesitant to change the MarsEdit interface to support crossposting more automatically, because I think it would be to the detriment of users who use it for more conventional purposes. But future development plans might make it possible to support crossposting as a “scripted action” that runs whenever you publish to a particular blog.

In the mean time, a great solution is to rig something up on your weblog server. In particular, I know of one plugin for WordPress that automates the process of crossposting from WordPress to LiveJournal. For more details about how this works, see the recent entry from Tycho about his use of the plugin in conjuction with a WordPress blog and LiveJournal.

I was cruising through Daring Fireball’s Linked List today, when I stumbled on the Ironic Sans blog. I was captivated not by the content, which is what motivated John Gruber to link it, but by the stunning visual appearance of the page design.

I have a soft spot for digital media that defies its nature and tries to adopt a more organic appearance. I suspect a lot of people share this aesthetic preference, so it’s ironic (heh, heh) that we don’t see more of it. I suspect the reason we don’t is because it’s really hard to do right.

What’s particularly good about the Ironic Sans blog is that it captures a lot of the clean perfection of digital while still being jaggy and texturized. The banner headline is perfectly legible in spite of its beautifully bleeding hatched fill. Meanwhile, the cross-hatched pattern that frames the page gives a clear border for the more-or-less conventionally faced digital content.

The juxtaposition of pseudo-analog and digital content just, I don’t know, it makes me excited. It makes me want to look at the site for its own sake. In fact, I wrote most of this blog entry before bothering to actually read the content that Gruber had linked to, a geeky encoding of the New York skyline into gray-scale representation of a histogram.

Some of you are probably wondering, if I like this digital defiance so much, why doesn’t Red Sweater’s design embrace it? Well like I said, I think it’s actually really hard to do right. But if I were a designer, I think I’d really enjoy working on this kind of digital design.

Update: Check out the blog post describing Ironic Sans’s design, pointed to in the comments by the site’s designer/author.

Those of you who are using FastScripts with the forthcoming Leopard 10.5 operating system from Apple will want to upgrade to FastScripts 2.3.4, which works better in that environment.

I don’t talk a lot about FastScripts these days, because I’ve been so busy focusing on other applications. But it’s still a really big part of my workflow here, and I don’t know what I would do without it!

Often I get feedback from people who have finally figured out how FastScripts can help them. The recurring theme to this feedback is “I had no idea it could do that!” So let me try to summarize some of FastScripts’s selling points more effectively than the current product page does:

• It lets you open or run (almost) anything, instantly by keystroke. Yes, it supports shell scripts, AppleScripts, applications, Automator actions, and can even open documents for you. Just put them in the Scripts folder.
• Its keyboard shortcuts can replace almost any menu item shortcut in any application, redefining the behavior with a script.
• Its context-specific behavior for Applications lets you define shortcuts for just one app, without affecting other apps.
• It installs in your menu bar, but is not a hack. It’s “just an app.”
• Built-in “On Screen Display” functionality lets you show nifty Growl-style feedback, even if you don’t run Growl.
• Oh yeah, it’s particularly good at running scripts quickly, without taking focus away from your target application, and without frustrating you.

I recently showed off some of my FastScripts tricks to the local CocoaHeads group here in Boston, yielding some oohs and aahs (and one immediate sale!). A lot of people are familiar with the awesome “everything launchers” such as LaunchBar and Quicksilver, but are increasingly less familiar with the benefits of an old-fashioned “macro” setup. I think this “one stroke and you’re done” approach still has a place, and can make you a lot more productive.

The biggest difference between FastScripts and these apps is FastScripts doesn’t strive to be a general-purpose launcher. It’s a paring knife where those apps are a cleaver. Its primary purpose is to alter the landscape of your Mac so that the results you want, in Mail, the Finder, Safari, whatever, are available at the pressing of a single keystroke.