I’m on the verge of a major move from New York back to the Boston area, but I wanted to get a quick release out to address some long-standing glitches in MarsEdit. These are the kinds of little issues that aren’t likely to cause major disruption for most users, but which are nonetheless infuriating if you happen to be affected by them.

• Fix issues that caused side-panels to shrink gradually when collapsed/expanded
• Fix a problem that prevented the width of the blogs list area from being restored across launches
• When main window’s preview is collapsed, it’s now kept collapsed when window size is increased
• Fix a crash that could occur when removing the last item from the Uploaded media list
• Fix a crash that could occur when “unsplitting” a post or searching/replacing in rich editing mode
• Fix a crash that could occur when authorizing Flickr

This update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page. It will be available for update via the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves the release.

After I get settled in to our new home in Boston, I hope to make a lot of progress on MarsEdit 3.4 and to continue chipping away at the long-longed-for MarsEdit Touch.

MarsEdit 3.3.3 is now available as a free update for registered MarsEdit 3 customers. Because of the relatively urgent nature of this update for Tumblr users, the direct-download version is being released before the Mac App Store has been approved by Apple. Mac App Store customers may download and run the direct-download version without restriction.

This update includes a change to improve the reliability of MarsEdit when posting to Tumblr. Previously, MarsEdit used an “API URL” for Tumblr that worked reliably, but which has recently been changed by Tumblr to fail with an error.

This release also includes a few other important fixes, so I recommend updating even if you are not a Tumblr user. Complete change list:

• Improve Tumblr posting reliability by switching to an API URL that is less likely to report “over capacity”
• Improve memory efficiency for post editor documents
• Improve reliability of setting and removing links on images in rich text mode
• The main window’s post list area now stays the same size while resizing window

This blog runs on WordPress, which has been a great solution for my needs. But as the developer of MarsEdit, you might guess I get the opportunity to see a whole heckuva lot of other systems, and sometimes find myself envious of their advantages, big and small.

One such advantage I noticed is that Squarespace users can log in from any page on their blog, just by pressing the escape key.

By default, WordPress requires that you either memorize the admin page URL, or list an ugly “Login” link i the blog’s template. I never liked the idea of having a login link for a site that only I should ever be logging in to, so for years I have omitted the login link from my site.

This means that when I’m reading comments or something on my site, and am not logged in, I have to do a silly dance before I respond or moderate a comment:

1. Go to the URL bar in my browser.
2. Change URL to /wp-admin/
3. Enter the proper login credentials.
4. Hit back button to get back where I was.
5. Reload the page to see the comment form as a logged-in user.

This ends today. My QuickLogin Plugin for WordPress is a drop-in solution that, when activated, gives your WordPress blog the same delicious escape-key behavior that Squarespace offers. Now when I am browsing my own blog and want to log in, I just press the escape key. After I authenticate, I’m automatically returned to the reloaded page I was viewing.

Black Ink 1.4.1 is out with just a couple bug fixes, free for registered Black Ink customers. New customers may purchase via the Mac App Store or directly from the Red Sweater Store.

This release fixes an issue where scroll bars in the clue list appear awkwardly under Lion, and also addresses a pretty nasty behavior for customers who have downloaded the new version of Across Lite’s official solving app: opening puzzle files in Black Ink fails completely.

How can the simple act of downloading another app render Black Ink useless for opening files? It has to do with Apple’s file-typing system, and an evidently relatively undefined behavior when two different applications lay claim to the same file extension, but tag it as a different type.

When I released Black Ink 1.0 a few years ago, I adopted Apple’s latest file-typing system, based around Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs). These identifiers allow developers to provide more meaningful information to the system about what a particular file type is, what file extensions it correlates with, more basic types (like text) that it might be derivative from, etc. Developers who “own” a particular file type give it a UTI

Since Black Ink works primarily as an editor of Across Lite format files, a format that was not invented here at Red Sweater, it would have been appropriate for me to adopt the owning company’s UTI when identifying the files that Black Ink knows how to work with. The problem? Litsoft, the company that created Across Lite, had for years neglected to update their software much, and had never declared a UTI type for the file format.

So I declared my own. I did it politely, using my own domain name in the UTI: com.red-sweater.blackink.acrosslite. I did this purposefully rather than trying to make up something on Litsoft’s behalf, so that I wouldn’t be stepping on their toes when they inevitably defined their own UTI.

In the wake of Lion’s release, that’s what Litsoft finally did. Their latest update to Across Lite declares a definitive UTI type for Across Lite puzzle files, which is fantastic! The problem is, Black Ink 1.4 knows nothing about it. To make matters worse, on some users’ systems, the very act of downloading and trying Across Lite’s changed the system’s idea of what .puz files are.

So users who simply tried out another piece of software were suddenly unable to open puzzle files in Black Ink. Not a good situation.

In Black Ink 1.4.1, the Across Lite UTI for “.puz” files is now listed as an “imported file type” for Black Ink. This means that while Black Ink is not considered the authoritative app for this type (nor should it be), the system should consider it a suitable candidate for opening and working with “.puz” files, whether it thinks they are of Across Lite’s UTI, or mine.