MarsEdit 1.1.8 continues the steady progress of the product with a number of bug fixes and usability enhancements:

• Make sure newly added custom tags items show up in popup menu
• Follow HTTP redirects when autodetecting
• Improve reliability of category syncing by limiting concurrent server requests
• Improve unicode blog support by defaulting to “Don’t Encode HTML Entities”
• Improved keyboard navigation of posts and blogs lists
• Add “extended” content to default preview template
• LiveJournal specific:
  • Add auto-detection for LiveJournal.com blog addresess
• Blogger specific:
  • Enable support for new enclosure support
• Drupal Specific
  • Fix to properly support MovableType-style categories
• Metaweblog specific (e.g. SquareSpace)
  • Fix category list retrieval

Buzz Andersen has written an emotional and truthful announcement of his departure from Apple. Congratulations, Buzz! Best of luck to you. You’re going to do great things.

I got to know Buzz online, through his blog and through occasional chat sessions on IRC. As it happens, I moved away from San Francisco just before I got to know a number of people online who I wanted to meet there. But since I visit often, it came as no surprise that I ran into Buzz one day at a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District. I was sitting with my coffee when Buzz sat down a few chairs away. I recognized his resemblance to an online photo and introduced myself. He snapped this photo of me. Afterwards, we walked down to Mission Street, caught a large street protest, and then I took him to my favorite thrift store.

I was relieved that Buzz didn’t hold any personal grudges against me. After my public critique of his decision to bow out of an interview with Cocoa Radio, he would have been entitled to. He was feeling the pressure of forces inside Apple. I was feeling feisty, probably partly because I had felt similar pressures as he was then responding to. My provocative post was sassy enough to warrant a vendetta, but Buzz showed no signs of holding one. I was grateful for that.

A lot of the themes in Buzz’s blog entry hold true for me as well. The desire to work for such a great company contrast with the lure of indie-freedom. Most people think I’m being dramatic when I say that I have regular dreams about my time at Apple, but it’s true. I have at least one dream per month. Surreal dreams about fantastic Apple office buildings, where my old co-workers behave somewhat more like characters from Twin Peaks. I’m always pleased in my dreams to be back in the comfort of my Apple life. These have become a regular staple in my subconscious life. A replacement for the “showing up to school naked” dreams of earlier years. That company put a spell on me, and it’s not likely to wear off any time soon.

I’m sure it’s true for Buzz as well. As he pulls away from the safety and comfort of that great Cupertino establishment, he isn’t leaving Apple behind. He’s taking a little piece of it with him, to share with the rest of the world. Good news for the world.

Jon Trainer and I were invited to take part in a special CocoaCast episode, where we discussed the delay of Leopard, open source organization, and advice for a community-developed application by CocoaCast’s listeners. We had a great time chatting with Russell. Check it out!

By the way, I mentioned Skim in the podcast, but couldn’t remember its name. I only remembered I had read about it on Michael McCracken’s blog.

No, not a clearance sale, I’m talking about MarsEdit’s support for Markdown, the easy-to-read text formatting language invented by John Gruber. Using Markdown, you can format your text using old-fashioned ASCII symbols like you might have done on bulletin boards or USENET. Once Markdown gets a crack at your asterisks, hyphens, and hash-marks, it translates them into sparkling HTML that will fit right in alongside the rest of your web content.

MarsEdit is an application for editing web content, the vast majority of which is HTML. So naturally it supports editing and previewing HTML text right in the application. But something not everybody knows is that MarsEdit also supports editing and previewing Markdown text right in the application:

(Click for full-size image)

I see Markdown as a response to a major problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: they overpromise and under-deliver, almost guaranteeing disappointment. If you can get your content to look the way you want it to, you’ll probably be horrified to see the HTML code that has been computer-generated to make it happen. Markdown strikes a nice compromise by providing a predictable set of rules so that you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Most Markdown users configure their blogs to do the Markdown “rendering” as needed for web presentation, but keep the text of the post in Markdown format for easy re-editing. This is where MarsEdit’s “pure text” editing becomes a great asset. What you see is what you send. This makes it great for editing the content of whatever system you’re using. If you’ve got a custom formatting script of your own, just install a copy into MarsEdit’s text filters folder, and you’ll have built-in previewing for your format, too!

While most publishing systems don’t support Markdown “out of the box”, the tide may be turning. As Daring Fireball noted today, TypePad not only supports the technology, but has added a thorough article explaining how to use it. I’m hoping to see increasing support in other systems over the coming months. If your system doesn’t support it by default, do a quick search for “markdown plugin” and I’m betting you’ll find somebody has a solution waiting for you to install.