For those who don’t know the history, MarsEdit didn’t originate here at Red Sweater. I acquired the software from Newsgator in early 2007 (wow, coming up on 5 years!), and it had been developed originally by Brent Simmons as a feature of NetNewsWire.

Brent told me at one point that it was called MarsEdit, because “Mars is cool, and Mars is far away.” It turns out that was the abbreviated version of the story. I was treated to a longer version in Brent’s talk at Çingleton a few weeks ago, and now he’s shared it with the world via his blog. The name was inspired by a Seattle cafe called “Free Mars”:

I was thinking about names I thought were awesome, and remembered one of my favorite place names: the Free Mars café in Belltown. It occurred to me that “Mars” was perfect, because Mars is cool, it fits with NetNewsWire’s space theme, and Mars is at a distance.

I probably never would have named the app MarsEdit. Who knows what it would have been, had it grown up from birth under my care. But by the time I took over the app, I was such a MarsEdit fan, as a long-time customer myself, that the name just rolled off of my tongue. Of course I would keep it.

I was just reading the eulogy from Steve Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, printed in The New York Times. She recalls Steve’s general obsession with “love.” I think many of us who care deeply for Apple and its products are touched by the emotional angle the company applies to its designs. It has been an honor to inherit MarsEdit because it’s also a very emotional product, to its passionate users and for its developers, past and present. Brent’s story helps to underscore that legacy.

Marco Arment wrote about the negative impression he had when, after paying $4.99 for a single digital issue of The New Yorker, he was nonetheless subjected to advertisements. He calls the combination of up-front purchase combined with an advertising subsidy “double-dipping,” implying that the content providers are somehow charging you twice for the same product.

I just don’t feel comfortable paying for an iPad or web publication, no matter how good it is, and then having ads shoved down my throat. It makes me feel ripped off: what did I pay for?

His article touched a nerve with some of my friends and colleagues who are tied into the publishing industry, and who are aware of how important ads are to the revenue models of many magazines.

I think that I get, and agree with, the gist of Marco’s complaint. For better or worse, paying $4.99 for a digital copy of a magazine feels like a premium price. When you pay a premium price for content, it just feels wrong to many of us to have ads heaped on top.

Jason Snell, the Editorial Directory of Macworld, reacted to Marco’s post by suggesting that a magazine’s delivery medium shouldn’t affect whether or not ads are justified:

@marcoarment Wait, so an iPad version of a magazine shouldn’t have ads, but it’s okay in a printed magazine?

Jason goes on to suggest that publications have many costs, and typically the purchase price only pays for a fraction of those. Jason also links to a blog post from Craig Grannell, who also hammers the idea that publications need ads to cover costs, and closes with a quippish reply to Marco’s “what did I pay for?” question:

How about the content, and the wages of the people who write the content, and who design the app?

This epitomizes what I think is an overreaction by many folks to Marco’s post. People are zeroing in on the objection to ads, and inferring that Marco doesn’t believe magazines should be reasonably compensated for the content they provide. Marco never suggests this. In fact, he’s the one who ponied up $5 for a copy of content that he values. The exact price, and whether it supports the specific business model of the company he is patronizing, is almost beside the point. To him, it just feels wrong.

In response to the criticism, Marco seems willing to acknowledge that his feelings about the ads are trumped by the realities of the industry:

Tons of feedback from magazine/news people telling me that my feelings are wrong and that I simply need to accept that ads are necessary.

Peter Cohen, a journalist with years of experience writing for publications such as The Loop and Macworld, minces no words in his response:

@marcoarment It’s not your feelings, Marco. It’s your understanding of the economics of content production.

This is all well and good, informing Marco how wrong he is for feeling that $4.99/issue is a price that should justify an ad-free reading experience, but nobody seems to be willing to go deeper than vaguely condescending dismissal. All the accusations of contempt and ignorance are a little unsatisfying without specific analysis of Marco’s allegedly mistaken assumptions.

Obviously a magazine costs more than $0/issue to put out, and obviously it costs less than, say, $500/issue to put. Marco’s expectation to read a digital copy of a magazine without ads seems well-warranted if the cost of the purchase compensates the magazine with enough money to pay all of their staff, all their service providers, and some money left over for, if they’re lucky, pure profit.

If Marco had paid $500 for that issue of the New Yorker, I think few would challenge his expectation that such a price warrants an ad-free experience. But he paid $4.99, which happens to be the same price as a newsstand copy of the magazine. When you compare $4.99 to the $1.49/issue that The New Yorker charges its loyal subscribers for paper copies, printed on glossy paper and mailed to their homes, it already feels like a huge premium. Presumably the publishers are not losing money at $1.49/issue (with ads), or they’d cease selling subscriptions. [Update: it’s been pointed out that they may well lose money on subscriptions if they know they can capitalize on secondary sales of books, etc., to their customer base]

We don’t know how much The New Yorker pays for bandwidth, or what percentage of their overall expenses the cover price accounts for. We don’t know if there are partnership fees for the digital version, or whether it needs to pay back a major infrastructure investment. We don’t know the specifics. We just know that Marco paid $3.50 more than a subscriber pays for the same issue, that it didn’t have to be printed, that it didn’t have to be mailed, and that it’s offered for sale in a venue where practically no other editorial content is sold at a premium price.

Is there something wrong with paying $5 for a digital copy of a magazine only to be subjected to ads? I don’t know. It may be necessary. It may be fair. But it felt wrong to Marco, and it feels wrong to me. That’s the publishing industry’s problem to figure out, and ours to complain about until convinced, by reasoning and without blanket condescension, to think otherwise.

MarsEdit 3.3.5 is out with a few small fixes, and a new feature to better support bloggers who write in right-to-left (RTL) languages. The update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page and from the Mac App Store.

A new per-blog setting lets you specify whether the text in a post should tend towards RTL. When this is set, MarsEdit’s rich text editor will show paragraphs with a RTL orientation, without altering the underlying HTML markup. This is based on the assumption that RTL blogs use CSS rules in the blog theme to impose the RTL directionality by default.

I’ve beta-tested the directionality changes with a few native writers of RTL languages, and they seem satisfied with the solution as it avoids them having to manually change each paragraph’s direction while writing. If you are a RTL writer and you think I’ve done something wrong in the implementation, please be sure to let me know.

Complete change list for 3.3.5:

• Support a new per-blog setting for default writing direction, to benefit right-to-left language bloggers
• Change default keyboard shortcut for full screen toggle to cmd-ctrl-F, the standard for Mac OS X
• Prevent a crash that could occur with some systems like Sina.com that return empty string instead of expected array
• Fixes to make uploaded images target the desired blog more reliably
• Fix a bug that prevented “Send to Blog” button from being clickable after launching from bookmarklet

Since Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday, the web has been overflowing with heartfelt tributes to the impact his work had on the technology world, and the world at large.

But a few people don’t respect or value the contributions that Jobs made. Richard Stallman, the famously anti-Apple, GPL protagonist, comes off borderline celebratory in his reaction:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.”

It’s dumbfounding to me that anybody who lives to any degree in the public’s eye could be this emotionally callous about the death of another person. He paints Jobs as a robber of freedoms, first and foremost, while neglecting to acknowledge the many liberties he brought, for example to those of us who can’t, or don’t want to build our own computing infrastructures.

I find it laughably easy to poke holes in the philosophy of “freedom” that Stallman and his acolytes passionately pursue. In this particular case, his metaphor of the computer as a jail brings to mind the beauty of constraints. Freedom from choice can be as liberating and empowering as freedom of choice.

Imagine a Steinway piano: each string is perfectly tuned so as to cast a unique, beautiful tone into the air with the gentle press of a key. I respect and value this instrument as a liberator of artistic expression. Many people find a lifetime’s pursuit of study in this device, extracting no end of joy from the limitless possibilities it offers.

But to Richard Stallman the piano must appear no less than “musical jail.” After all, the sound spectrum is made up of an infinite number of tuneable pitches, and this … instrument … this villainous oppressor of choice, limits its users to a paltry 88 tones.