Wow! What a thrill to be listening to one of my favorite podcasts, MacBreak Weekly, and suddenly Leo Laporte is uttering my name, and expressing his satisfaction about my acquisition of MarsEdit.

And then I think I was so excited that I started hallucinating, because it almost sounded like Merlin Mann chimed in about FlexTime, and lo, there was a great praising. And everybody was happy. Especially me.

Listen to Episode 33: The Stay-At-Homers, and be sure to perk your ears up around 1:18:00 (that’s 1 hour, 18 minutes in).

My favorite quote is from Leo Laporte about FlexTime, “You know, I have FlexTime and I’m trying to think of what to do with it.” Yeah, the story of that app’s life. Reminds me of John Gruber’s initial reaction. Suffice to say, once you figure out what the heck to use FlexTime for, it will become indispensable :)

Thanks, Leo & Merlin!

It’s always a little bit embarrassing to release two versions in the space of 12 hours, but the alternative is even worse…

MarsEdit 1.1.5

• Fix a crashing bug in Blogger auto-detection.

i use this is a Mac-focused community site for users of Mac software products. The premise is pretty simple, sort of like Digg crossed with MacUpdate. Users and developers add products to database, and if a particular user likes the product (or simply uses it), they click “i use this” and it bumps the use number for that item.

The interface is dead simple, but with some “Web 2.0” panache. The site serves as both a sort of popularity meter for applications, and as a means of looking for updated versions. It also allows users to add comments about the applications they use.

I was talking earlier today to Marcus, one of the site’s developers, and decided to give him some “pie in the sky” wishes for the site. A few short hours later, those wishes are realities! How exciting.

You can now subscribe to a feed for the latest users of a given app, and to the comments for any given app. This is a great tool for developers who want to pay attention to what’s going on with the apps on the site. Now when somebody “adds” one of my products I can get a little warm fuzzy as a space-bar through it in NNW. And when somebody posts a comment, I can read it and respond to it if appropriate.

For example, MarsEdit is listed on the site, and currently has 146 “users.” (Go on, crank that number up!). With Marcus’s new changes, I can now subscribe to user comments on MarsEdit by supplying NetNewsWire with a URL like this:

http://osx.iusethis.com/comment/app.rss/marsedit

To subscribe to comments for your (other) favorite app, just replace marsedit with the name that shows up at the end of your app’s iusethis URL.

To subscribe to all the users of MarsEdit, I subscribe using a similar URL:

http://osx.iusethis.com/app/users.rss/129

For this one, you can easily derive it from the users page for any app. Just add “.rss” to the users part of the URL!

I think these changes are pretty awesome, and totally geared towards making the site more useful to both users and developers. Nice work, Marcus!

Oh yeah, and while you’re in there, “use up” FlexTime, FastScripts, and Clarion, too.

I’m happy to announce MarsEdit 1.1.4, which includes a number of minor fixes, and adds support for “New Blogger” weblogs which use Gmail authentication.

Actually quite a lot of little changes went into this, making it a pretty significant update. The Blogger support was top on my priorities, but as I was working on that, little fixes popped up left and right, so I made as many of them as I could.

• Blogger Support! Autodetect of a Blogspot blog should now detect “New Blogger”
• RPC Log Fixes
  • Add more RPC detail to the log
  • Increased maximum size of RPC Console log for debugging large fetches
• Weblog Settings Fixes
  • Fix keyboard tab-cycle in Weblog editor dialog
  • Fix autodetection for Blogger & WordPress
  • Minor changes to layout of dialog
  • Be sure to always use latest dialog edits when “Auto-detecting”
• Enclosure Editor
  • Minor changes to layout of enclosure editing sheet
  • Fix bug with Enclosure URLs involving 302 redirects
• Changes to Help
  • Fix indexing
  • Add information about “New Blogger” type setup
  • Add top-level link to “Getting Started” page
• Bookmarklet changes
  • Fix to handle 2-byte characters and other non-ASCII correctly
  • Add support for advanced “marsedit:” URL parameter “&weblog=BlogName”
• Autosave improvements
  • Mark rescued documents as dirty to avoid accidental loss
  • Fix a problem where autosave document could get stuck and always cause warning
• Blosxom Specific
  • Improve performance on Blosxom blogs with lots of directories/files
• Miscellaneous
  • Fix bug preventing drag-reordering a weblog to top of weblog list
  • Update “Starting a Weblog” window to simplify choices for new users
  • Fix a crash that could occur connecting to an unsupported blog system
  • Fix a small memory leak in Keychain password retrieval
  • Fix the blog editor window to – Make sure the “advanced” tabs go away when switching a post to a less feature-ful blog

Wow – that was a lot! I have to admit I’m a little bit nervous, but I think overall the release is going to be a lot more reliable and stable for people, especially those just getting started.

Please let me know if anything comes up.

Update: I forgot to mention that the fix for UTF-8 characters in the bookmarklet was accelerated by looking at the bookmarklet for WebnoteHappy. It was doing things correctly and I … was not. Thanks Luis for providing a ready example that lead me down the right track!