MarsEdit 3.7.5 is now available from the MarsEdit home page, and will be available soon for update on the Mac App Store.

The main purpose for this update is to respond to security concerns with the Sparkle software update mechanism that MarsEdit uses. Although Red Sweater uses a custom version of Sparkle, it was vulnerable to the same issues affecting the main distribution of Sparkle.

MarsEdit now uses HTTPS exclusively to communicate with Red Sweater not only for the purpose of downloading updates, but for other functions such as checking for news announcements, or submitting crash reports.

This release of MarsEdit 3.7.5 caps off a recent spate of updates I’ve made to Red Sweater’s apps, bringing them all up to date with the same use of HTTPS exclusively for communication with Red Sweater’s servers.

In addition to the HTTPS updates, this update fixes a rare crashing bug.

• Fix a crash that could occur when subtle image upload failures occur on WordPress
• Switch to HTTPS URLs for increased security loading resources from Red Sweater

Enjoy!

A WordPress bug was brought to my attention in which changing the publish status of a post from “Draft” to “Published”, while also giving the post a specific date, for example to schedule it for the future, would cause the post to be unexpectedly published immediately, instead of scheduled for the future date.

I looked into this and discovered the problem is in WordPress’s server-side infrastructure. Specifically, there were changes late last year that expose clients such as MarsEdit to the problem. I submitted a fix for the issue to the WordPress team. Hopefully they will review and agree that it merits including in a future update!

In the mean time, if you use MarsEdit with WordPress, you should beware if you take advantage of both the ability to publish posts as drafts to WordPress, and the ability to later turn that draft into a scheduled post by setting a future date in MarsEdit.

Unfortunately, the only reliable way I know to avoid this problem from MarsEdit is to give your draft post a date before you ever send it to WordPress. If a draft post starts out with a date specified, the bug will not occur on later edits to the post, for example when you switch the publish status to “Published.”

I hope this bug is fixed in a public update to WordPress, soon!

MarsEdit 3.7.4 is now available from the MarsEdit home page, and will be available soon for update on the Mac App Store.

Sharper, more typographically sensitive eyes pointed out that the font for the main window lists in MarsEdit 3.7.3 and earlier was stuck on the old system font, Lucida Grancde. Starting in OS X 10.11, Apple adopted their own custom San Francisco font. This update fixes MarsEdit to use the new typeface when running on OS X 10.11 or higher. This update also addresses an issue with the size of text fields for some Tumblr fields.

• Fix to update main window font from old Lucida Grande to new San Francisco system font
• Fix a discrepancy in font size for some text entry fields e.g. Tumblr quotations

Enjoy! Let me know if you run into any problems.

FlexTime 1.3 is now available from the FlexTime home page, and will be submitted to the Mac App Store for review by Apple.

This update fixes a few pesky bugs and also brings an updated look to FlexTime’s document window design. I decided to finally get rid of the decidedly out-of-date “polished window” reminiscent of iTunes from a decade or more ago.

I took the opportunity with this update to also take advantage of OS X’s “auto save” functionality so that you can not only quit and reopen FlexTime without worrying about saving, but also revert to previously saved versions with OS X’s built-in Time Machine history browser.

Here is the complete list of changes for this release:

• Support for OS X Autosave and Document versioning
• Clean up the document window interface to better match look of OS X
• Fix a bug that caused an additional untitled document to appear when reopening the app
• Fix a bug that could cause a crash when closing a running routine
• Fix a bug that prevented completely empty routine documents from opening
• FlexTime now requires OS X 10.10 or greater.

Enjoy, and let me know if you notice anything amiss!