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.

Following the cues of friends Shawn Blanc, Marco Arment, and Neven Mrgan, among others, I’m digging in to the Red Sweater Blog archives to find some older posts that I think are worth reading, if you missed them the first time around.

I love the idea of highlighting things that others have written, but since I don’t have a convenient repository of these items, and haven’t got time to scour my mind for suitable candidates, I’m sticking to what I know best. Presented here with a brief synopsis:

• Adiós a las Computadoras Dell. On the eve of Apple’s transition to Intel processors, I speculate that the end is nigh for Dell.
• Magical Code. Based on my experience working at very low levels inside Apple, and on my own high level stuff, I dispel the notion that any code is so magical that you can’t understand it.
• Five Things I May or May Not Know. Particularly meaningful for folks who are grappling with the idea that their full-time work is not for them, and are toying with the idea of branching out on their own.
• The Road Less Traveled. The story of my transition from a full-time Apple engineer to a self-bootstrapped software business owner.
• Forget the Shortest Path. Wisdom inspired by lessons in sailing. Sometimes moving directly at your objective is not the most pragmatic way of reaching it.
• It Should Be Free. My reaction to the expectation among some customers that things should be free. I dig into the true cost of “free” things.
• Getting Pretty Lonely. My rant against the GPL open source license.
• Elements of Twitter Style. My fairly recent prescription for getting the most out of Twitter, while annoying the fewest.

Thanks, as always, for your attention to my blog and my writing.

Like many people these days, I am using Marco Arment’s Instapaper to facilitate effortless postponement of reading longer, potentially interesting content I find on the web.

Marco provides a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s button bar, so when you find something cool you just click “Read Later” and it gets added to your Instapaper collection. This is handy, and if you’re using a browser like Safari, these bookmark bar items even get mapped to default keyboard shortcuts based on their position, e.g. Cmd-1, Cmd-2, etc.

My news reader of choice, NetNewsWire, also supports Instapaper, allowing me to easily add any news item’s underlying content to my “Read Later” list. In NetNewsWire, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-P (for paper!), and I’ve gotten hard wired to punting stuff to my reading list with a quick flick of the keys.

For months I’ve thought it would be nice if I had the same workflow in Safari and in NetNewsWire: see something, want to read it, don’t have time, press Ctrl-P. I don’t know why I took so long to sit down and spend the 5 minutes it took to write an AppleScript wrapper for Marco’s bookmarklet, and install it in my scripts folder to invoke with FastScripts.

If you want to be cool like me:

1. Download and install FastScripts. Free for up to 10 shortcuts!
2. From the FastScripts menu-bar icon, select FastScripts -> Create Safari Scripts Folder.
3. Download this script, and move it to the Safari-specific scripts folder: [Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> Safari
4. Switch to Safari.
5. While holding the Cmd key, select “Read Later” from the FastScripts menu.
6. Assign a keyboard shortcut of your choice. (Ctrl-P for NNW-likeness).

Now whenever you see a cool page in Safari, just press Ctrl-P to instantly tag it for later reading.

Update: David Kendal observes on Twitter that you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to bookmarks in Safari by simply using the System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts and assigning to the correctly named bookmark. I was not aware that this would work with bookmarks! Very cool. It diminishes the necessity of the above workflow considerably, though I was pleased to be able to take “Read Later” out of my bookmarks bar. Another downside to the System Preferences route? Apparently the keyboard shortcuts will never take effect until you’ve shown the menu that they appear in at least once per Safari-launch.