I’m happy to announce that MarsEdit 3.7 is available now from the MarsEdit home page and will be submitted to the Mac App Store approval for approval by Apple. If you are an existing Mac App Store customer, you can download and use the direct-download version immediately. Just switch back to the App Store version after you notice it’s been approved.

One week ago today, MarsEdit compatibility with Blogger was broken by a change in Google’s authentication requirements. I’ve spent the past week adding the required changes to MarsEdit so that Blogger blogs can be authenticated with the most modern mechanism Google offers: their company-wide OAuth2 implementation.

The big change for Blogger users is that instead of the usual MarsEdit authentication panel, requesting your Google username and password, you will see a larger window pop up with web content served directly from Google:

While updating MarsEdit to use the new system was not a trivial undertaking, it is a valuable change for the long term. The new authentication scheme offers two significant improvements to protect your Google account’s security:

1. Your password will no longer be stored (or even handled) by MarsEdit. The Google web window authenticates you using your login information, and then shares with MarsEdit a unique authentication token, which is now stored securely in the OS X keychain. This token allows MarsEdit to connect to your Blogger account without prompting you again for permission.
2. You retain the option to revoke that access at any time, without even opening MarsEdit. Although MarsEdit always stores passwords securely in the OS X keychain, this additional level of security ensures that even if somebody were able to gain access to your keychain contents, they would not obtain unfettered access to your entire Google account.

This has been a wild week, but I’m very relieved to be able to offer this update for Google Blogger users. Folks who don’t use Blogger should also update, because there are a few minor fixes that will, in particular, improve the experience of using the MarsEdit Media Manager for some workflows.

Complete list of changes in MarsEdit 3.7:

• Restore functionality for Google’s Blogger blogs by supporting their modern authentication scheme
• Fix handling of dates to ensure proper post scheduling in all locales/regions
• Fix some visual flickering of the Media Manager’s album/folders lists while clicking them
• Refinements to Apple Photos support in Media Browser
  • Prevent a crash that could occur in media manager when no Photos library was created yet
  • Fix a problem where some groups could be expanded even if there are no contents inside

Please let me know ASAP, either in the comments below or by other support channels, how the update is working out for you.

Since learning on Tuesday about MarsEdit’s sudden failure to connect with Blogger blogs, I have been working to restore functionality.

I’m happy to share that I’ve published a working (I hope!) beta release with preliminary support for connecting to Blogger through their newer authentication system, OAuth2. You can download a pre-release of MarsEdit with this functionality here:

Download MarsEdit 3.7b2

Be aware that when you first go to publish to your blog, upload an image, or delete a post, MarsEdit will pop up a login window for Google, right in the app. This is expected and is part of the new method for accommodating Google authentication:

Be sure to use the Google account that is associated with your blog. After you sign in once and approve the connection, you shouldn’t need to sign in again.

There are a few rough edges in this beta release, but I want to make sure those of you who are waiting for a fix get something to try as soon as possible. Please let me know if you run into any major problems, particularly problems that prevent you from connecting to and editing your Blogger blog.

I am disheartened to confirm that as of today, May 26, 2015, MarsEdit will fail to connect to any blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot service.

MarsEdit has supported Blogger for many, many years. A side-effect of having supported it for so long is the app uses an authentication method, ClientLogin, which has been phased out over time, and is no longer supported by Google.

Although I knew that Google was encouraging developers to adopt a newer authentication method, I was not aware that the ClientLogin mechanism would be shut down this month, or even this year.

I am committed to maintaining support for Blogger in MarsEdit, but adapting to a new authentication method is a non-trivial change, and not something I can turn around immediately. I will make it a priority to update MarsEdit as soon as possible, and will post again on this blog when a beta release is ready for testing, so that Blogger users who are anxious to return to MarsEdit can give it a try.

In the mean time unfortunately I don’t know of any workaround that will allow Blogger users to continue using MarsEdit. I appreciate your patience while I work to update the app.

MarsEdit 3.6.9 is available now from the MarsEdit home page and will be submitted to the Mac App Store approval for approval by Apple.

This update adds support for browsing images stored in Apple’s new Photos app, released with OS X 10.10.3.

Other changes include bug fixes affecting the post editor, application of the preview filter to posts on some blog systems, and an issue with pasting URLs copied from another application such as Safari.

• Fix to include photos from Apple’s new Photos app to Media Browser
• Fix “Apply Preview Filter Before Publishing” for Tumblr and Movable Type blogs
• Fix a rare crash that could occur when a document window’s content changes while closing
• Fix a problem with dragging images from Flickr or Catalog panes of Media Manager to HTML Text edit area
• Fix an issue pasting HTML e.g. from a copied link in Safari
• Fix a bug that prevented find/replace from working when replacement string contained a single quote (‘)

Enjoy!