MarsEdit 4.3.1 is now available from the MarsEdit home page and on the Mac App Store.

This update is a minor update with a few bug fixes:

• Fix a crash when a blog has a favicon that cannot be rendered
• Fix a crash when opening some posts from Nifty Cocolog blogs
• Fix a visual glitch in the Find/Replace panel
• Fix a bug that prevented system highlight color from applying to Rich Text in Dark Mode

If you enjoy MarsEdit, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter, and of course, writing about the app on your own blog! Thanks for your support.

MarsEdit 4.3 is now available from our web site and on the Mac App Store.

First up, this release addresses a number of issues affecting the upload of GIF images. Chief among them: animated GIF images can now be resized without losing animation!

Second, a significant revision to MarsEdit’s Media Manager should improve its appearance for folks who are running in macOS Mojave’s Dark Mode. We added Dark Mode support in MarsEdit 4.2, but the Media Manager still had some rough edges.

Finally, this update contains a grab bag of little fixes and enhancements, any one of which might just make your day. Here’s a list of all the changes in MarsEdit 4.3:

MarsEdit 4.3

• Improvements to handling of uploaded GIF images
  • Support resizing animated GIFs while preserving animation
  • Fix a bug that caused some GIF images to be uploaded as empty files
  • Fix a bug where GIF images uploaded to Tumblr blogs were converted to PNG format
• Interface improvements
  • Refine Dark Mode support in the Media Manager
  • Fix a bug that prevented a visual divider line from appearing in Media Manager
  • Change the “New Category” placeholder text to a subtler style
  • Improve status messages when refreshing blog
  • Revised Preferences layout to unify General and Editing into single “General” tab
• Other improvements
  • Fix a crash that could occur when undoing after “Restore Default” in the Quick Posts template editor
  • Fix the size of preview window content to match what is seen in web browsers
  • Fix a missing image MarsEdit Help in Text Filters documentation
  • Support new Micro.blog distinction between created and modified dates on posts
  • Fix a bug that could cause additional image markup to be entered when adding a photo to a Tumblr post

If you enjoy MarsEdit, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter, and of course, writing about the app on your own blog! Thanks for your support.

Custom fields are a powerful feature of many WordPress blogs. You can add custom fields to support specific behaviors that are not supported by default. You might add custom fields to support plugins that do SEO optimization, associate custom downloadable data with a post, or to control some other feature of a custom theme or plugin.

On the Core Intuition Podcast, we use Custom Fields to support the listing of sponsor information on the show’s web pages. When a specific episode is being shown, a custom WordPress plugin looks up information about the episode’s sponsor, and adds suitable content to the sidebar for the page.

To achieve this, I first picked some suitable names for my custom fields, and added them to the site through the WordPress “wp-admin” interface. Then, I opened MarsEdit’s preferences and edited the “Custom Fields” section of my blog’s settings:

You can type whatever you want for the “MarsEdit Label”, as it only affects how MarsEdit will identify the field in post editor window. The important part is the “Server Custom Field Name” which must match whatever the field’s name is in your WordPress admin panel.

Now whenever I am editing a Core Intuition podcast episode, the custom fields show up right along with standard fields such as Title, Tags, etc:

I just type or paste in the suitable values for the show’s sponsor, and everything else is taken care of for me automatically.

MarsEdit is great for setting up streamlined publishing workflows. If you’re using WordPress Custom Fields, you can use this one-time configuration change in MarsEdit to make it easier than ever to add custom field values to your posts.

Raise your hand if you, or somebody you love, still presses Command-S constantly while editing text, or really, working with any content in any app on your Mac.

Those of us who have been using computers for a long time remember a day when, if you didn’t remember to save, then you might lose everything. These days most apps, including apps such as our own MarsEdit and Black Ink, support some form of autosave, making this old-fashioned habit unneccessary, yet harmless.

Some apps, such as Apple’s Notes, have gone so far as to remove the save command. This is good in the sense that it simplifies the app, but bad in the sense that users who aren’t familiar with autosave may not know their work is saved. It’s also bad for compulsive Command-S savers, because every time we press the keystroke, we’re greeted with a loud BEEP! from the computer. Thanks for nothing.

One of Red Sweater’s apps, FastScripts, offers an elegant solution for quieting the beep that occurs in Notes, or in any other app for that matter, when Command-S is not wired up to any menu item. Because FastScripts can be used to override just about any keystroke, you can configure it to run a script in Notes when Command-S is pressed. The script? It does nothing. Thanks for nothing, indeed.

To use FastScripts to quiet the beep in Notes:

1. Download FastScripts. It’s completely free for up to 10 keyboard shortcuts.
2. Launch FastScripts and look for the little script icon with a lightning bolt, in the upper-right corner of your Mac’s main screen:

   

3. Open Notes on your Mac.
4. With Notes running, click the FastScripts icon and select the “FastScripts” submenu, then select “Create Notes Scripts Folder”:

   

   This is the folder in which we’ll create and save a “Do Nothing” script for Notes.

5. Open Apple’s Script Editor from the Utilities subfolder of your Mac’s Applications folder.
6. Create a new script by selecting File -> New Script from the menu bar. You can leave it empty, or type something as a comment to remind you about it’s purpose:

   

   Save the script and move it to the “Notes” folder you just created in the Finder.

7. Switch back to Notes, where we’ll assign a shortcut for the script.
8. Click the FastScripts menu icon, you should see the “Do Nothing” script appear near the top of the menu. Hold the command key down while you select it. This is a shortcut to jump to FastScripts preference and start editing the shortcut for the script:

   

9. In the FastScripts Preferences window that appears, you should be editing the keyboard shortcut for “Do Nothing”. Press Command-S on the keyboard to register the new shortcut:

   

10. There’s no step 10!

Ah, the sweet silence of Command-S in Notes has never … not sounded … so good?

These steps may sound laborious, but you’ll quickly get the hang of it. Creating a such a script takes only a minute or so when you’re familiar with FastScripts and the Script Editor. You can use the same technique with any other app on your Mac that behaves in an unwanted manner when you compulsively press Command-S, or (almost) any other key, for that matter!