Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit

Grok Headline matches for Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit

[DRUPAL-SA-2005-001] New Drupal release
fixes critical security issue

[DRUPAL-SA-2005-001] New Drupal release
fixes critical security issue 06/05/2005 11:39 PM
Posted by Uwe Hermann, Friday, 3 June

Drupal's New BlogAPI Module

Drupal's New BlogAPI Module 06/06/2005 12:15 AM

Genius. Sheer genius. After my previous rant about what I had to hack to get things working the way I wanted with ecto, Drupal 4.6's blogapi module improves significantly on things and allow me to add any content I want (with sanity limitations) via ecto.

Which means that if I wanted to add a tagline to the top rotation, or a quote in-between articles, I just open ecto. If I want to start a forum topic (indeed, if you wanted to; login with your username and password) I would just open ecto. If I wanted a new static page, I just open ecto.

Hacking bl0gapi.module

Hacking bl0gapi.module 03/14/2005 05:10 PM

So, not content to work around problems, I took the most annoying problem out of the Drupal/ecto post and fixed it. Item #2, the bit about not being able to use the extended entry field, was due to a curious coding in the blogapi.module file. On or about line 595 we have this mess:

if ($struct[‘mtexcerpt’]) { $node->body = $struct[‘mtexcerpt’] .’<!–break–>’.$node->body; } if ($struct[‘mttextmore’]) { $node->body = $node->body . ‘<!–extended–>’ . $struct[‘mttextmore’]; }

What the hell was this person thinking? Without a line break, the “break” keyword won’t get parsed! Topping that, “Extended” isn’t even a parsed keyword in Drupal 4.5 and there’s no such thing as an excerpt in 4.5, either. So, time to re-think what we want to do with these three fields.

Drupal is hot!

Drupal is hot! 08/03/2004 03:39 AM

JoshB points out....

Check out Drupal

Marc Canter writes about wanting tools he used to have in Radio Userland. The first feature he mentions is one of the key features of Drupal. "The functionality of having a POST button right next to the news story - is essential." I could not agree more. In fact the features he asks for are possible in Drupal. I'm not certain that the WYSIWYG copy and paste is standard but it wouldn't be difficult to add. Drupal is rapidly out pacing many of its 'peers' who seem to rest more on their laurels than innovation.

A seperate post answers Dave Winer's (majority shareholder and founder of Userland) question about why not stay with Radio. I have to agree. Winer took the Userland products (Radio, Frontier) commercial for all the right reasons. He needed to and it seems they are doing very well. But they attract a different audience as commercial products. The community that had been vibrant and public has now either ebbed into the 'paid' areas of content for the product's owners or disappeared entirely (I'm really not certain, the last time I owned one of the products the paid area was definitely thinner than the previous public community had been). Either way the visibility and realization of the possibilities is now available only to those who continue to pay for their subscription.

[Adding Understanding]

Drupal 4.6

Drupal 4.6 04/16/2005 03:17 PM

My Drupal Code Changes

My Drupal Code Changes 02/07/2005 01:25 AM

As promised, the parts of Drupal that I changed to get CP working the way I like it.

Where are the objects in Drupal?

Where are the objects in Drupal? 04/04/2005 10:32 AM

So we've hired a bunch of programmers who have asked me "where are the 'classes' in Drupal?" "Why doesn't Drupal have 'object-oriented' programming?"

These and a host of other related questions were put to Moshe Weitzman - one of the NON Bryght Drupal dudes we've hired recently (yes things are taking off here at Broadband Mechanics.) So Moesh sat down with some of his homeboys and wrote up this little tome - which I thought some of you might be interested in.

Jonas Luster or Leonard Lin might wanna also weigh in - as well as Phil Pearson or Lucas Gonze. Is this whacky Drupal hook system any good?

WHAT! Nodes aren't objects! And what's the story with these GoF dudes? Design Patterns - hmmmmm.

We can make this a real blogosphere conversation!

Have at it dudes. Can 1,000 Drupal programmers be wrong? Are they correct in all their assumptions?

Only the end-users will know for sure - cause last I looked - they don't care. But I care.

Drupal handbook going CC

Drupal handbook going CC 12/19/2004 02:55 PM

The handbook for Drupal, one of the most popular web content management systems (Spread Firefox is a recent high-profile example) has adopted Creative Commons licensing so as to

• make clear that Drupal community members can use the documentation in the Drupal handbook in other contexts, such as revising and developing site specific help docs.
• allow the integration of already existing Drupal documentation being developed outside of drupal.org by Bryght, CivicSpace, and others.
• eliminate potential legal conflicts over rights of use.

This is a good example of a community taking an existing work with a large number of contributors and obtaining the agreement necessary to take advantage of a standard Creative Commons license.

Thanks to Victor Stone for the pointer.

Drupal for Bloggers

Drupal for Bloggers 06/16/2004 05:17 AM
Drupal for Bloggers
http://j ames.seng.cc/wiki/wiki.cgi?Drupal_For_Bloggers

Drupal is a very powerful Open Source Content Management System (CMS) which can be configured for many purposes, ranging as a collobrative tool to simple blogging.

The purpose of 'Drupal for bloggers' is develop a customized version of Drupal which has features that typical movabletype (MT) bloggers are used to. This is based on Drupal 4.4.1 so it is pretty stable but it is not complete. The goal is to develop it to a stage where the default installation is a blogsite, with all the neccessary modules and hacks to make it user friendly (good enough to replace movabletype) at the sametime not touching any core drupal system so you can still use all the wonderful drupal plugins.

You can take a try out the system before you use by clicking here.

Getting there - FOAF into Drupal.....

Getting there - FOAF into Drupal..... 06/01/2004 10:05 PM

FOAF is making it into Drupal.

So for all you Drupal lovers and suppoters out there we have a question for you......

"What sort of relationships would you like to see established between DSrupal members?  Should we create really specific kind of relationships, like Project Colleague or more general ones, like friend - or both?"

We need to know as we're extending the drupal.profile module to import/export FOAF and........

..... Drupal currently doesn't grok more than just you.

 

Moving to Drupal

Moving to Drupal 02/05/2005 09:11 PM

I'm working on moving CP to Drupal. It's amazingly easy since someone wrote an importer in Perl that actually uses MT's own code to get the data and then writes it to the Drupal DB. Even better is that with a simple one-line update to the code it will take the URL that MT gave the entry and give that to the new entries, so all my old links will work.

So, with that done, I work on the template to bring this theme over to Drupal (I did it before for an old version of MG, so I'll just toy with that one).

So, why Drupal? Well...

Drupal is our CMS of choice

Drupal is our CMS of choice 04/26/2004 07:06 PM

I've been doing my own survey of the 'platforms' out there - and we're working with Drupal.  Looks like a  winner to me.

Thanks goes out to Julian Bond for cluing me in on Drupal - a long time ago.

Now that I've met Jonas and Chris and Walkah and Adrian and Neil and Dries - we're ready to bring free open source social networking - to everyone.  Oh and God bless FOAF and danbri too.

All headed towards a PeopleAggregator module for Drupal.

=================================

Content Management Systems for alternative media.

I'm looking into systems to set up an alternative media website.

Here are a few that I found today:

The independent media center uses Mir as an Open-Source content managment system.

The Boston Indymedia Center runs on dadalMC.

dadaIMC also sports a new "license" section, allowing the author to specify a distribution license, selecting from public domain, standard copyright, or one of the Creative Commons licenses.

The Wes Clark Community Network used Scoop. Here's an interesting one, publicaccesstv.net.

H ey look, demand media runs on Scoop too!

[unmediated]

Holy Drupal!

Holy Drupal! 12/29/2003 11:44 PM
Just stop the bus and lemme off. If you care about small (and not so small) CMSes, you owe it to yourself to take a hard look at Drupal 4.2. Yeah, it's a bitch to install without command line access -- though there are ways -- but Drupal's getting so many conceptual things right that it can't be ignored. Drupal looks very rich and very extensible. Because it's open-source GNU/GPL licensed, I predict it'll pull ahead and stay ahead of all competing products. The UI's not all it...

Drupal is Live

Drupal is Live 02/05/2005 09:11 PM

And now we're up on Drupal.

1. Hacked mt2drupal to support the contributed trackback.module in Drupal 4.5+
2. Hacked mt2drupal to use MT's calculated archive link for the entry in Drupal's URL table rather than a self-generated one.
3. Hacked autopath.module to re-create my old-style of archive links for new entries.
4. Cleaned up old converted MG template to make it match CP again; merged some stylesheets in the process.

Missing in action:

• Random quotes.
• Old forum content and users.
• Offtopic blog
• Some static pages (coming along one-by-one).
• MT

Drupal 4.3 released

Drupal 4.3 released 11/04/2003 12:49 AM
This highly dynamic program is a built by a collaboration of programmers and is very dynamic. The base system is...

drupal.org - community plumbing

drupal.org - community plumbing 05/16/2004 02:18 AM
Drupal - open source content management system .. ierik ynetim sistemine .. Powered by Drupal .. so

drupal.org
track this site | 4 links

Drupal 4.3.0 ya está aquí

Drupal 4.3.0 ya está aquí 11/11/2003 12:49 PM

Drupal/etco Quirks

Drupal/etco Quirks 03/14/2005 05:10 PM

Some lessons for using ecto with Drupal.

MetaTag Drupal Module 4.3.1

MetaTag Drupal Module 4.3.1 12/20/2003 03:48 PM
A drupal module for manipulating meta tag information.

MarsEdit 1.0

MarsEdit 1.0 12/17/2004 06:35 PM
MarsEdit is a weblog editor for Mac OS X that makes weblog writing like writing email—with spell-checking, drafts, multiple windows, and even AppleScript support. It works with various weblog systems: Blosxom, Conversant, Manila, Movable Type, Radio UserLand, TypePad, WordPress, and others.

"MarsEdit"

"MarsEdit" 09/22/2004 08:23 AM

"Wordpress development further
approaches that of Drupal"

"Wordpress development further
approaches that of Drupal" 02/05/2005 09:45 PM

Drupal patch for remote editing

Drupal patch for remote editing 02/01/2005 10:07 PM
Noah Mittman: “If you’ve wanted to post more than just blogs with Drupal and your remote client of choice, it’s worth taking a look at walkah’s patch to the blogapi.module which allows you to use, say, MarsEdit, to post blog, stories and forum content.” (Note: it works with ecto too.)

Heliopod: A Great Looking Drupal Site

Heliopod: A Great Looking Drupal Site 11/01/2002 06:49 PM
Heliopod: A Great Looking Drupal Site Wow. HelioPod rocks. This is a cool community site / blog site for the Solaris platform. Best of all (well from my perspective at least) it's built with one of my favorite open source projects, Drupal (yes, Drupal is php based). [ Go ] They're even very generously offering to host blogs for Solaris folk: Just wanted to remind everyone that if you create an account (over there on the right) you can then keep a personal weblog on our server. It's a great place to post your daily Solaris experiences, or really anything you want.If you are a vendor, we encourage you to create a weblog and post your specials and deals. If enough people vote +1 in the submission queue, we'll promote it up to the front page for all to see. But even if it isn't on the front page, it's still visible on the User Blogs page. You can't complain about a little free advertising.So sign up, and tell the Heliopod community about your Solaris adventures. I'm not a big Sun guy but if I was I'd be spending a lot of time there. Oh and for more information on Drupal go here. [ Go ]

Moving Movable Type to Drupal

Moving Movable Type to Drupal 12/07/2002 09:32 AM
Moving Movable Type to Drupal Well anyone who's into blogging and more than a bit geeky would probably like this one. It's a description of how one user moved from Movable Type to Drupal, step by step. Nicely done ! Why migrate I migrated my MT blog to Drupal. It wasn't easy to make this decision, because I became used to the ease of use that came with MT in terms of setting up, administering, and blogging. I simply found that MT was lacking in some of the features and scalability I need, particularly with regard to classification and news feed aggregation. Since I've been using Drupal for the past year and extolling its features, I decided to eat my own dog food and use Drupal for my personal site. This way I can contribute to its development because I'll be looking at it more from the back side.Migrating was not exactly for the PHP/MySQL novice -- which I consider myself -- so I wanted to document my experience for others who might consider the same move. I encourage anyone who decides to go with Drupal to please consider becoming part of the development list and get involved with helping evolve the application. Drupal is a very programmer-centric application at the movement, catered to technical people, but if non-technical people or people who demmand ease of use and usbility begin to add their voice to the development list, perhaps the administration experience will improve. I hope to throw some time into making these types of contributions in the future.So here's how I migrated (this is being updated presently): [_Go_] It's definitely worth reading. And I've added his blog to my favorites so I make sure to follow it. His comments about moving to Drupal for the news aggregator are on point (here's a tutorial on it I wrote). Beyond the news aggregator, an additional useful tool is that the blogroll is dynamic and shows you how recently the blog was updated. That's often more than enough to tell you to read it. His points about Drupal becoming more usable are definitely on point -- but they are a very big concern of the project and we're pushing to get them addressed. This brings up a very good point about open source: we tend to like to make people happy. Just like anyone else and the "squeaky wheel gets the grease". If people start complaining about something (usability) then it tends to get addressed -- particularly if the project is user driven as is Drupal. Our user base to this point has been more technical and that's affected what we work on. Now its getting more end userish and that will be reflected. I've talked with the one of the project leaders on this and he definitely gets it.

Build An Online Community With Drupal

Build An Online Community With Drupal 05/30/2004 05:01 AM
WebmasterBase May 30 2004 7:43AM GMT

Playing with MarsEdit

Playing with MarsEdit 02/05/2005 09:11 PM
O’Reilly: Giles Turnbull: Playing with MarsEdit: “I’ve been involved in the launch of a new web project during the last couple of weeks. Since it relied on heavy use of the Movable Type online publishing system, I thought it would be worth trying out one of the desktop weblogging applications that are floating around these days.”

MarsEdit takes off

MarsEdit takes off 12/19/2004 03:55 PM
Congratulations to Brent and Sheila of Ranchero Software on the release of MarsEdit 1.0! MarsEdit is a weblog editor for Mac OS X that makes weblog writing like writing email—with spell-checking, drafts, multiple windows, and even AppleScript support. We like...

MarsEdit 1.0 Released

MarsEdit 1.0 Released 12/17/2004 06:44 PM
Ranchero Software has released MarsEdit 1.0, a weblog editor for Mac OS X that makes weblog writing like writing email—with spell-checking, drafts, multiple windows, and even AppleScript support.

[[ Visit http://www.macmegasite.com for full article ]]

Introducing MarsEdit

Introducing MarsEdit 09/21/2004 08:46 PM


MarsEdit, our new weblog editor, is also in public beta. NetNewsWire 2.0 does not include a weblog editor: instead, it works with ex ternal weblog editors.

MarsEdit is designed to make writing for the web like writing email. It has a main window listing weblogs and recent posts, and you create and edit posts in separate document windows. A screen shot illustrates.

For everyone who bought NetNewsWire 1.x, all NetNewsWire 2.x and all MarsEdit 1.x upgrades are free.

MarsEdit report

MarsEdit report 12/17/2004 06:34 PM
In the spirit of Gus Mueller’s after-development report on VoodooPad 2.0, here’s mine on MarsEdit 1.0...

(Note: I may ramble a bit. And: this is mostly about programming.)

Mitosis

The genesis of MarsEdit was the idea of mitosis, that we could remove NetNewsWire’s weblog editor and create a new, separate weblog editor—and thereby create a better newsreader and a better weblog editor.

We had long planned to support external weblog editors in NetNewsWire—but it wasn’t until autumn 2003 that we considered supporting only external weblog editors. That’s when we first sketched out MarsEdit’s user interface.

To my delight, the final version of MarsEdit looks very, very much like our original vision, done originally as a non-functioning prototype in Interface Builder.

Splitting up NetNewsWire like this was a big risk, though, and we didn’t know how it would be received. (It turned out that the feedback far surpassed our hopes.)

We not only split up the product but created an open interface so that various combinations of newsreader and weblog editor could work together. This is something we’re very proud of—even though it increased the risk.

Programming stuff

Early on, before testers even saw it, I had a few challenges...

1. Morphing user interface

I had to develop an adaptable user interface that morphs based on the capabilities of different weblog systems—and not have the morphing be obnoxious.

This was a response to one of the major problems with NetNewsWire’s weblog editor: fields that a given system couldn’t use were just disabled rather than disappeared. This led to lots of email and bug reports. Though I’m not generally a fan of UIs that morph, it had to be done here—and I was utterly pleased with the result.

At first, actually, I was entranced—I used to just keep changing the weblog system to watch the animation of fields appearing and disappearing. But I got over it and went to work on the next thing.

2. Asynchronous XML-RPC

I had to do a better job dealing with asynchronous XML-RPC calls than I did in NetNewsWire.

Here’s the deal—you click a button like Post or Refresh, it kicks off a call to the server to do something. MarsEdit waits for the response—but it can’t lock up while waiting, it has to be responsive to your commands, and it has to do things like run a progress indicator. And calls have to be chainable: make a second call after the first completes, but not before.

Well, I had this working in NetNewsWire’s old weblog editor, but I was never pleased with it, and there were times when the UI would miss the response, and a progress indicator would run forever.

This was just an architecture job. I ended up with a system both cleaner and better than what was in NetNewsWire. (The second time is usually better than the first, after all.)

What I ended up with was solid plumbing. With leaky plumbing, you spend all your time patching it and not enough time working on the UI—and the UI is where you need to spend your time.

I have barely touched this code (except to add a minor feature or two) since MarsEdit first went into private testing, which says alot for the code.

From a high level, every net operation looks like an Objective-C method call that, instead of returning a value, returns immediately and calls back to a method when it’s done. Since the code is object-oriented, maintaining state is almost not even an issue. (Simple stuff, nothing revolutionary, just plain old-fashioned goodness.)

3. Documents

Cocoa has wonderful built-in support for document-based applications.

The only trouble is, that support assumes that you’re saving documents to disk.

The whole point of MarsEdit was to be document-centered, like email—but, also like email, you don’t save files to disk, you send your document to the internet somewhere.

I had to learn about Cocoa’s document-based app features—and, at the same time, I had to learn how and where to over-ride it so that it didn’t think it was loading and saving disk-based documents. This turned out to be difficult—lots of trial-and-error. The docs don’t talk about this much.

And the early, private testers would tell you that I didn’t have all the kinks worked out in the first versions they saw.

Design philosophy: maximum elegance

Throughout the process of working on MarsEdit, the phrase “maximum elegance” repeated in my head. The idea was to keep it as simple and focused as possible.

As I’ve written before, weblog editing is far more complex than email: you have things like categories and text filters and trackbacks and all this stuff you don’t have with email.

The phrase “maximum elegance” was just a personal reminder to myself to simplify as much as possible. With something as complicated as weblog editing, you have to be relentless about simplification, or it will get away from you.

Note, for instance, how short and small MarsEdit’s menu is. How many other productivity apps do you use have such a small menu? Note how the design of document windows is influenced by Apple Mail rather than, say, Microsoft Word.

The “lightness” of an application is a matter of feel rather than number of lines of code or number of resources. It’s a design issue. I wanted MarsEdit to feel weightless in order to balance the heavy complexity of weblog editing.

Note to developers—regular folks, please skip this—there is, oddly, a danger to making an app feel light. People sometimes get the impression that it’s not light but slight—that it can’t possibly have very many features and couldn’t have taken much time to develop, so it can’t possibly be worth paying money for. That’s not true, of course. (It’s like that old line about not having enough time to write a short letter.) However, even though there’s this danger, it’s better to go for lightness, because the vast majority of Mac users appreciate quality.

The early, private testers were a huge help with this. I simplified—but they simplified even more. There was lots of feedback about stuff that could be removed from these early versions, and I think I used all of it. (I’m a strong proponent of development-by-subtraction—after all, MarsEdit exists because we removed the weblog editor from NetNewsWire.)

Of course, there’s no design nirvana. MarsEdit is very close to my original vision, and that’s wonderful—as long as the original vision is good. But is there room for improvement? Could the user interface be better still? Yes, of course. (And I already have plenty of ideas for how to make it better.)

Last-minute features

Once MarsEdit was in public beta, it was fairly close to what 1.0 would become, but of course there were bugs to fix.

And it turned out that there were a couple features I was putting off until after 1.0 that really needed to be in 1.0:

1. Preview with text filters—Markdown and similar.

2. Customizable list of URLs to ping.

That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of other feature requests, but so many people asked for these two that it became apparent that they had to be in 1.0. If I could have waited on these, I would have.

Before deciding to implement them, I had to answer a few questions for each feature:

1. How much time would it take to develop?

2. How much time would it take to test?

3. Is this feature a likely site of bugs, or will it be straightforward?

4. Can it fit in the existing user interface without major disruption?

For text-filter-preview and customizable pings list, I guessed (and all you can do is make an educated guess) that they would be quick to develop and test, that they’re straightforward, and that the user interface wouldn’t require many changes.

Another popular feature request was supporting titles for Blogger. This we didn’t do in 1.0, because it would take too long to develop and test and it would be a likely site of bugs. It sounds crazy—we’re just talking about titles, no big thing, right?—but it required adopting the Atom editing API, which is a big job. (Now that 1.0 has shipped, this is MarsEdit’s top priority, by the way.)

Wrong turns

There weren’t many features pursued that I had to drop or change drastically. Just a few things:

1. At one point during the private beta I wanted to add what I thought was a cool Rendezvous-based feature—but it didn’t interest the testers, and finally it didn’t interest me personally that much, and I dropped it before spending programming time on it.

2. The first versions of MarsEdit did previews quite a bit differently: the preview appeared in a drawer attached to the document window. This was cool for one major reason: it tied the editing window and the preview together. In a way, this is much better than having a separate, single preview window. But it had a serious drawback: you couldn’t resize the preview independently of the size of the editing window.

At one point I considered doing the preview as a splitview in the document window, which would have let you semi-independently resize it—but I ended up going for a separate preview window. (There were testers on all sides of this issue, by the way: there was no consensus. Sometimes a solution is obvious to everyone but the developer, but not this time.)

3. For a long time during the beta process the app icon looked very much like the Firefox icon. (This was just coincidence—the MarsEdit icon was originally created before the Firefox icon was created. The final icon Bryan Bell created is fantastic. I love it.)

The real story behind the name MarsEdit

In an alternate universe, MarsEdit is an outliner instead of a weblog editor—and its name is MarsLiner. It has the exact same icon MarsEdit has.

When I first asked Bryan to make a Mars-with-spaceship icon—way back in early 2003 (I think—could have been 2002) it was for an application named MarsLiner. The idea was to do an outliner that could fill in for MORE.

It’s been a sore spot in my computing life that no outliner for OS X feels as good to me as MORE did. This is purely subjective, of course—there are several really great outliners for OS X. But I want MORE, and I was willing to write it myself. (Just the outliner, that is—I didn’t care about the presentation stuff in MORE.)

The idea was to have a text-oriented outliner—I didn’t care about embedding movies and sound clips and whatnot—that was designed for keyboard users, felt very light, and was super-fast.

The rough draft of this idea was the Notepad in NetNewsWire 1.x. But MarsLiner was to be a huge improvement, it was supposed to be the outliner of my dreams.

But then I discovered something important: most people don’t care about outliners. And the people who do care about outliners, many of them would want the embedded media features that I didn’t care about. So I realized that the market would be small, just a subset of the outliner market, which is small enough already—and there are already some great outliners already.

When we decided to bag MarsLiner and do a separate weblog editor instead, I wanted to use the name “Mars” somehow and use Bryan’s cool icon. Hence the name MarsEdit. We rationalized the name by saying it represents editing at a distance, since you’re not editing local documents, you’re editing documents that live on the web somewhere.

But really it was because I like Mars and spaceships and we already had a great Mars icon.

How much programming time had I spent on MarsLiner? Very little, thankfully—I built NetNewsWire’s Notepad as a stand-alone app. I didn’t even get as far as supporting multiple documents or doing a save command.

But still today I wish for the outliner of my dreams.

From time to time I’m tempted to do it as a Terminal-based thing, all done with ncurses. This way it would have to be purely keyboard-based; it wouldn’t be able to display pictures or movies; it would be fast.

Maybe you will do it. I can dream, right?

MarsEdit Future

MarsEdit Future 12/17/2004 06:34 PM
Now that 1.0 is out, what’s next for MarsEdit?

Below are some—but not nearly all—of the things planned for the future.

Fixing that time bug!

The most commonly reported bug is actually a WordPress bug, unfortunately. In some configurations, the time on the server for a post sent from MarsEdit is incorrect: it doesn’t take into account the time zone difference properly.

My hope is that this will be fixed in WordPress 1.3.

(By the way—there are many MarsEdit users who love WordPress. My point isn’t to knock it: WordPress is quite cool.)

Blogger and titles

MarsEdit doesn’t yet support titles for Blogger.

It will—but it requires implementing the Atom weblog editing API first. This is MarsEdit’s top priority.

WYSIWYG editing

Dave Hyatt has said publicly that WebCore will support HTML editing. We plan to use it to add WYSIWYG editing to MarsEdit.

It will be a choice, of course—those of you who prefer plain text won’t have to use the WYSIWYG editing feature.

More image features

People ask for thumbnails, drag-and-drop, resizing, iPhoto integration, etc. etc. All excellent ideas.

Though MarsEdit’s main point is to be a literate weblog editor—an editor for people who love writing—images are very important.

Uploading enclosures

I’m not even sure yet if it’s technically possible, given the current weblog editing APIs—but folks want to upload files that get added as RSS enclosures (aka podcasts).

Cocoal.icio.us support

Should MarsEdit include del.icio.us features, or should it work with Cocoal.icio.us?

On one hand, you have people who say, “I want each app to do one thing and do it well.”

On the other hand, you have people who say, “I want an app that puts it all together, the whole package.”

Is del.icio.us support part of that “one thing” that weblog editors should do? Is it a necessary part of “the whole package?”

I don’t know!

But, when in doubt, if there’s another app to work with, why not support that other app instead of redoing the work? After all, MarsEdit already works with a variety of newsreaders, browsers, and text editors—why not work with Cocoal.icio.us too.

An opposite case could be made, surely, and it wouldn’t be wrong—but my personal preference is to work with other apps as much as possible.

More...

The above list is not comprehensive—there’s plenty more. MarsEdit is just getting started.

But the above covers the most common bugs and feature requests we’ve been hearing.

MarsEdit 1.0 ships!

MarsEdit 1.0 ships! 12/17/2004 06:34 PM


MarsEdit 1.0 ships today!

Finishing a release—especially a one-point-oh—feels great.

Coincidence, not planning—a trailer for a remake of War of the Worlds was posted today. I can’t tell if the invaders are from Mars or not going by the trailer—but I sure hope so. (Thanks to Robert Daeley for emailing me about the trailer.)

Beta: MarsEdit 1.0b3

Beta: MarsEdit 1.0b3 09/23/2004 11:22 AM
Ranchero Software released MarsEdit, a weblog editor that offers drafts, preview templates, spell checking, sending of update notices, and other features.

Intel, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, again

Intel, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, again 06/17/2005 04:30 PM
AAAAAAAAAA AAAAGH!!! MY LIFE'S WORK, SHOT TO HELL!!! WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

FlickIt supports MarsEdit

FlickIt supports MarsEdit 06/05/2005 10:56 PM
ChanceCube: “Whether you want to post a photo to your blog, send a link to one via E-mail or instant message, or would like to paste the source of it into an application you’re using - FlickIt can handle it.”

The FlickIt dashboard widget lets you access Flickr photos and put them inside your weblog posts written in MarsEdit.

Intel, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit

Intel, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit 06/17/2005 04:30 PM
For most Cocoa developers the Intel switch won’t be a big problem. For our apps it’s not quite as easy as just checking a checkbox, but it shouldn’t be very difficult, either.

NetNewsWire, for instance, is made up of a collection of components: several frameworks, bundles, and libraries. Each separate component will have to be Intel-ified before the main executable will run Intel-native.

I’m guessing that, in terms of work, it will be somewhat less work than, say, adding the Bloglines subscriptions feature was. Probably 5% as much work as the syncing feature. In other words, in terms of the amount of work I expect to do, it’s a relatively minor feature.

So of course we plan to make our apps universal; we plan to support PowerPC and Intel.

Not at all developers will have it as easy, of course. Cocoa developers using Xcode are likely to have the easiest time making universal binaries.



I’ve heard and read some fearful reactions about the Intel thing. Here’s the deal: the Mac developers I know are professionals. They’re not going to just do PowerPC only or Intel only.

One of the things about independent developers is that they often do a great job of supporting a range of systems. Consider this: Safari with RSS runs only on Tiger, but NetNewsWire still runs on Jaguar. This isn’t some special case, this is normal for independent developers.

You might say something like, “Oh, that’s just because Apple wants to sell operating systems and independent developers want to sell to everybody, even people who don’t upgrade.”

To that I’d say, “Yes! You’re right! We have a very strong incentive to support different systems.” It’s just plain good business sense.

And, at least for the majority of Cocoa developers, this support won’t be a big deal. We already do stuff like this. In fact, supporting older operating systems is probably quite a bit more difficult.

How to move NetNewsWire and MarsEdit to
a new OS

How to move NetNewsWire and MarsEdit to
a new OS 04/07/2005 03:40 PM
Once Tiger ships, a question we’ll get is how to move your NetNewsWire and MarsEdit prefs and data to a new OS.

Here’s what you need to copy over...

NetNewsWire:

1. Prefs: ~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist

2. Data: ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/

MarsEdit:

1. Prefs: ~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.MarsEdit.plist

2. Data: ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/

That’s all. (Well, the applications too, of course.)

ATPM reviews MarsEdit

ATPM reviews MarsEdit 01/01/2005 08:50 PM
Wes Meltzer reviewed MarsEdit 1.0 for About This Particular Macintosh. It got a “Very Nice” rating—which is nothing to sneeze at for a 1.0. And there’s some great feedback in there we can use for future development.

(Oh, heck, of course we wanted an “Excellent” rating—but, hey, even Delicious Library got a Very Nice rating. Good company to be in.)

One of the things I love about the review is that it talks about Bryan Bell’s work:

In fact, this is one of the application’s greatest strengths. I’m no expert on iconography, though I play one on TV, but all the icons seem immediately recognizable for what they are. That’s a formidable challenge with a weblog editor, since it doesn’t have any real-life analogues, and piggy-backing off of Mail could be confusing. I am especially fond of the way the “… Weblog” command icons look: an action symbol superimposed on a Safari-esque window. And the “… Post” command icons use a sheet of paper with action symbols. It’s a very clean way of saying a lot with a little, and they make an abstract concept much more approachable.

I like this because it recognizes Bryan’s excellent work and also because it’s a mini-tutorial on developing toolbar icons. It’s not enough to make them attractive and clean—the use of metaphors that make sense and are consistent is a huge part of the icon designer’s art.

Though not an icon designer myself, I know just enough to have some small idea how wickedly difficult it can be.

And so not only Bryan but all the great OS X icon designers—Jon Hicks, definitely, and others whose names I don’t know—deserve our fondest thanks for helping make OS X apps usable and fun.
Grok Description matches for Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit
GrokA matches for Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit

Drupal, an open source platform and
content management system. Must
investigate

Drupal, an open source platform and
content management system. Must
investigate 05/15/2004 05:52 AM
drupal.org community plumbing .. Drupal 4.2 .. Drupal

drupal.org
track this site | 4 links

Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: drupal blogapi