By now I am somewhat famous for my slowness in adopting the iOS platforms for my major apps: MarsEdit and Black Ink. The truth is I have been working on these releases for years, but it’s also true that work has been intermittent as I refocus on Mac versions of my apps and on other commitments in my life.

One of those other commitments has been raising a small family. My son, Henry, will become a big-brother in a matter of hours or days, and in honor of that I’ve decided to update my only shipping iOS app: Shush.

Shush 1.0 was a simple, dare I say embarrassingly simple, project that came out of our interest as new parents in Harvey Karp’s Happiest Baby on the Block techniques for soothing infants in the first few months of life. Among the bag of tricks is shushing the baby, creating white noise with your mouth: “Shhh.” While this trick worked for us, it became a little exhausting to make the noise for as long as it seemed helpful to Baby Henry.

For the new baby, I anticipate using Shush again, so I decided to give it a facelift. I had imagined over the years since I first released it that it would be fun to have it embrace some of the iPhone’s playfulness and provide a highly skeuomorphic television-set style design. This is Shush 2.0:

Don’t get me wrong: I know I won’t win any graphic-design awards for this, although it represents a peak of my skills in that area. Those of you who remember Shush 1.0 will probably consider this at least slightly more visually appealing. I tried to maintain the simplicity of Shush 1.0 while livening up the interface. I actually simplified a bit by removing the “Start/Stop” button. To turn Shush 2.0 off, you just slide the volume to its lowest position. To make the TV metaphor work, Shush is locked to landscape orientation. But I positioned the slider so it would be easily and intuitively navigated with the thumb while “holding the phone wrong” in an upright position.

Also new in this release are Shush’s ability to make static noise in the background while you continue to use your iPhone or iPad. I imagine this will be handy especially for parents who want to produce that sweet, soothing static, but would also like to so catch up on Instapaper, Twitter, or whatever while they’re cradling the baby.

Finally, that skeuomorphic television static actually provides something of a hypnotic animated effect. Some users may find the visual display useful either for lulling themselves or for distracting and amusing a baby. From a technical standpoint I’m particularly proud of the effect. Inspired by a suggestion from Mike Ash, I implemented the static animation as an OpenGL Shader, so it runs almost entirely on the iPhone’s GPU. This means it is extremely efficient and not liable to slow down your phone or gobble up your battery. If you don’t like the TV static or just want to save even more power while Shushing, you can put the display to sleep and Shush keeps on Shushing.

I hope you enjoy Shush 2.0. Let me know if you give it a try or have feedback about my decisions in redesigning this simple application. To answer the inevitable question: yes, MarsEdit and Black Ink are still under development for iOS!

If learning to program is even a minor goal for you, Code Year (via Brent Simmons) might be just the encouragement you need. They promise to email you on a weekly basis with coding lessons to help you achieve your goal.

I’m one of those computer programmers who downplays the difficulty of the profession, because “if I can do it, anybody can do it!” On the other hand, I have faced challenges that made me question whether I’m vaguely qualified for the job. What it boils down to is that programming is both incredibly simple and impossibly hard, like so many important things in life.

There was a time when nobody knew how to write literary prose. The geniuses who invented it shared their special tool with a few friends, and they relished in their private, elite communications. Eventually monks, politicians, and academics joined the club. Now, we judge a society’s overall level of intellectual advancement by the literacy rate: the percentage of people who have learned to read and write.

Literacy isn’t about becoming a Hemingway or a Chabon. It’s about learning the basic tools to get a job done. I think programming — coding — is much the same. You don’t have to be the world’s best programmer to develop a means of expressing yourself, of solving a problem, of making something happen. If you’re lucky, you’ll be a  genius, but you start out with the basics.

Long ago, it would have been ridiculous to assume a whole society could be judged by its ability to read and write prose. It feels ridiculous now, to assume that we might use computer programming as a similar benchmark. Yet it may happen.

Did you always mean to learn another language, but never did? By all means, learn Spanish, French, or Chinese. But learn to code, too.

I enjoyed Joshua Topolsky’s rebuttal to the high-fives exchanged between John Gruber and MG Siegler about the Galaxy Nexus allegedly being less polished than iPhones are. I didn’t pick up on some of the cringe that Joshua pointed out, in particular the implication that rich people who have “nicer” stuff will always enjoy some impossible to crack understanding of the finer things in life.

And yet John and MG are totally right. You either see it or you don’t. This is egalitarian, relating to all facets of life, in every nuanced area of preference or priority. For whatever details a given person appreciates and values, far more people will be disinterested and be unlikely to even distinguish differences. How about those Android aficionados? They’ll point to the flexibility afforded by true multitasking, freedom to install unapproved apps, etc. They shake their heads at silly iPhone lovers, hold their phones up high and take pride in these qualities. To them, these are the finer points. This is the “polish.” The rest of us just don’t see it.

For many of us who make, use, or write about software for a living, polish is all about removing from the software as many jarring behaviors as possible. Sweating the small stuff. It’s exactly the details like the persistently stuttering scrolling that MG points out that continue to make Android products appear less polished to us. It’s seriously unnerving. It’s a big freaking deal to us, while other people just don’t see it.

It doesn’t have to relate to expense, and isn’t restricted to a premium class of product. It’s also, of course, not restricted to vision. I can imagine some of my wine-loving friends holding up a $15 bottle of something precious they’d discovered, while expressing disdain for a $200 bottle of swill that somebody else just adores. Nor does it need to be something “high class.” I’m sure a number of hard-working farmworkers could explain to me in agonizing detail why I picked the absolute worst rake and shovel for my garden.

If you’ve got a taste for something, a nose for something, an eye for something, an ear for something, a feel for something, and you find a product that soothes that sense, then you have a special gift: the ability to cast judgement on inferior efforts. Other folks? They’ll either sense it too, or they won’t.

MarsEdit 3.4 is now available for direct download from the Red Sweater site, and as an update in the Mac App Store.

For a long time I’ve been hoping to improve MarsEdit’s media management capabilities. It already does a great deal to streamline browsing and insertion of images from Flickr, iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, etc., but it could do much, much more.

This release takes MarsEdit a step in that direction, giving the media manager window a minor UI overhaul, fixing bugs, and adding some new browser capabilities such as a zoom control for media thumbnails, and ability browse iPhoto pictures by “Faces.”

Lightroom users will be happy to see that MarsEdit now has limited support for Photo Collection Sets. As I’m not a dedicated Lightroom user, I may be missing some nuances of how this should work, so continue to give me your feedback about how MarsEdit hits or misses the mark with regard to Lightroom integration.

The update also includes a few fixes for nagging bugs. Of course, there are many more in the queue, so hold tight and stay tuned if your pet peeves haven’t been addressed this time around.

MarsEdit 3.4

• Media management improvements
  • New zoom control for browser thumbnail size
  • iPhoto Faces browsing support
  • Lightroom photo collection set support
  • Upload Utility window now resizable
• Flickr browser improvements
  • Now supports “Medium 640” size
  • Only shows image sizes that are available for the selected image
• External Editing improvements
  • Now supports Byword in default editor list
  • Now displays a warning panel if the selected app is not installed
• Bug Fixes
  • Bookmarklet handler now heeds sourceHomeURL, sourceFeedURL, sourceName
  • Prevent a crash when selecting SVG format images
  • Disable width/height fields for non-image files in Upload Utility
  • Fix a bug where post IDs were sometimes not saved for posts and pages