I am happy to announce that after a short, productive beta release period, Black Ink 1.3 is now available for direct download and through the Mac App Store (has been approved but may take a little while to update in the store).

• New web puzzle sources
  • LA Times Daily & Sunday
  • Newsday
  • USA Today
  • Universal
• Rework the Startup preferences to be more user-friendly with reopening puzzles
• Give keyboard shortcut Cmd-K to “Check Current Letter”
• Now includes automatic crash reporter
• Fix a bug that caused Black Ink to hang when printing on rare occasions
• Fix a bug that caused puzzle timer to be placed off screen edge
• Fix a bug that could prevent puzzle solving menu items from being enabled
• Fix a bug that prevented canceling a stalled puzzle download from working

Enjoy!

The success of Black Ink on the Mac App Store has motivated me to get busy working on a number of improvements I have been planning for some time but just hadn’t found time to do.

The big deal in 1.3 is that I added support for a different format of puzzle that opens up Black Ink to a number of new sources for more solving fun.

Because I don’t have a strong, established beta testing group for Black Ink, I’m opening this up as a public beta to get any bugs ironed out before it goes public for the Mac App Store and direct-purchase customers. If you’d like to test out, just download and give it a spin!

Download Black Ink 1.3b1

Be sure to drop me a line if you run into any problems, but also if you are interested in being part of a more permanent Black Ink beta testing group. I’m going to try to get organized for future, private testing rounds.

A round-up of the changes to expect in this release:

Black Ink 1.3b1

• New web puzzle sources
  • LA Times Daily & Sunday
  • Newsday
  • USA Today
  • Universal
• Rework the Startup preferences to be more user-friendly with reopening puzzles
• Give keyboard shortcut Cmd-K to “Check Current Letter”
• Now includes automatic crash reporter
• Fix a bug that caused Black Ink to hang when printing on rare occasions
• Fix a bug that caused puzzle timer to be placed off screen edge
• Fix a bug that could prevent puzzle solving menu items from being enabled
• Fix a bug that prevented canceling a stalled puzzle download from working

Known Issues

• Encoding issues with Newsday 2/4/11 characters
• Documentation not updated to reflect reworked startup preferences
• Puzzle icons in startup window get smaller if window closed and reopened
• Newsday, USA Today, and Universal have generic icons for now

Enjoy!

MarsEdit 3.1.6 is now available for direct update for customers who purchased through the Red Sweater Store. A Mac App Store version has been submitted and will hopefully be approved by Apple soon. Update: as of February 3, MarsEdit 3.1.6 is available on the Mac App Store.

Important aside for App Store customers: I am working on a solution that will, in the future, allow those of you who bought through the Mac App Store to also run newer releases before Apple has approved them. Until then, hold tight for Apple to approve this release. Things will get better!

This is an incremental bug-fix release and addresses a number of small nuisances and some rare crashes.

• Media manager and image upload improvements
  • Use a nicer format for default alt text description
  • Fix the file extension of image file name to match the actual format
  • Fix a bug where e.g. PNG images were converted to JPG when resizing
  • Auto-convert image formats not suitable for web to PNG
  • Fix a possible crash when searching for photos
• Fixed the Convert Line Breaks filter so it doesn’t add paragraph tags to preformatted text
• Fix an occasional crash when doing a global search/replace
• Fix possible crash when mistyping keyboard shortcuts in the app
• Add a special error message for situations where Tumblr is not responsive

I use Twitter. A lot, and almost entirely on my Mac desktop. Over the years, I have switched between many popular client applications, often returning to old favorites when the specific advantages of one outweighs the advantages of another for my current priorities.

The way I use Twitter is to leave one of these client applications running in the background, with all the notification settings set to off. I still check it quite often, but it’s on my terms. If I get deep into concentration working on some bug, chatting with a friend, or or watching a video, I don’t want Twitter interrupting me.

Twitterrific was the first desktop client I used, and I can’t remember whether it was the default choice or if I picked it, but I got in the habit of using the global keyboard shortcut Cmd-Ctrl-T to toggle the window’s visibility. When I tried other Twitter apps, I made a point of setting the preference in that app to match the same shortcut.

Eventually I tried an app that didn’t support a setting for a global keyboard shortcut, so I had to write a script to do it for me. It occurred to me at some point that I could write a single AppleScript to handle the toggling of visibility regardless of which app I was using.

Download “Toggle Twitter”

The script logic is pretty simple: given a list of common Twitter app-names, is one of them running? If so, toggle it. If not, launch it. If you’re using something else, just add it to the list, and it should work perfectly.

I used FastScripts to hook this up to the global shortcut Cmd-Ctrl-T because it matches my historic muscle memory, and well, T is for Twitter.