I’m terrifically pleased to announce that MarsEdit has been acquired by Red Sweater Software!

Daniel Jalkut writes more about it on his weblog, and Greg Reinacker writes about it on his weblog. There’s also a press release and a short Q&A with me and Daniel.

Congratulations to Daniel!

Flareman: “I wrote it to be able to turn lines / paragraphs of text in lists, both ordered and unordered in blog posts to Blogger, using the <ul/ol><li>...</li>...lt;/ul/ol> tag that Blogger’s own HTML WYSIWYG editor uses.”

Flareman: “I wrote it to be able to add color to text in blog posts to Blogger, using the <span style="color:(r,g,b);"></span> tag that Blogger’s own HTML WYSIWYG editor uses. It will only work with an open post window and some text selected in it. Once activated, the script will launch Mac OS X’s color picker, allowing you full freedom while choosing the color you want applied to your selection.”

SansFiltre: “Since the beginning, Markdown was developed to be used as a text filter for various text editors. I thought that it was probably possible to do the same with wiki2xhtml, the ‘engine’ driving the wiki syntax of Dotclear.”

ChanceCube: Slugger is “a WordPress plugin that allows you to put your desired post name inside of your post content.” If you have this installed on your server, and you use MarsEdit, you can specify the post name within MarsEdit.

MarsEdit 1.1.2 has been released!

This release includes a new backup feature: before sending a post to the server, a plain text version of the post is written to disk. From time to time we’ve seen a server report that all is well—when really the server lost the post. This gives you a way to get back your work in case the server reports, wrongly, that all is well.

Other changes include bug fixes, especially for Blogger and Blosxom weblogs.

See What’s New in MarsEdit 1.1.2 for more details. You can download the update from the MarsEdit home page.

On inessential.com, Brent explains the differences between MarsEdit and iWeb. Though both can be used as part of a blogging workflow, they’re different in intent and purpose: MarsEdit is an editor that works with weblog generators such as TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress, while iWeb is an editor that is also a weblog generator.

MarsEdit 1.1 is out of beta, shipping today!

It’s a universal binary—it runs on Intel Macs as well as PowerPC Macs. It has a bunch of other new features, including support for Technorati tags, enclosures, titles for Blogger weblogs, date editing, and easy text filters support. Here’s what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1.

You can download it from the MarsEdit home page. It costs $24.95, and is available bundled with NetNewsWire for $39.95. And it’s a free upgrade for current MarsEdit users.

Also see the press release for more information and quotes.

MarsEdit 1.1fc2 is the second final candidate release—it adds 2006 to the copyright date in the About box and it includes an updated French localization.

You can download it from the beta page.

(Just in case you missed the previous 1.1 betas, here’s what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1.)

Derrick Story, O’Reilly: “It sports a clean UI that you’d expect from Ranchero (feeling very NetNewsWire like), is very easy to connect to your MT server, enables roundtrip editing in your favorite text editor (in addition to its own friendly editor interface), has easy-to-use image uploading (uses a separate window that also catalogs your previous image uploads for easy repurposing), includes an RPC console, and is AppleScriptable.”

MarsEdit 1.1fc1 is a final candidate release. At this point we’re looking for any deal-stopper bugs that must be fixed before shipping.

You can download it from the beta page.

This release includes an updated Help Book, more graceful preview window updating, and a bunch of bug fixes. (More detailed change notes are on the beta page.)

(In case you missed the previous 1.1 betas, here’s what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1.)

MarsEdit 1.1b6 is the second public beta of MarsEdit 1.1.

You can download it from the beta page.

This release updates the French localization and fixes a few bugs, including a work-around for a time zone problem with some weblog systems. (More details are on the beta page.)

(In case you missed the previous beta, here’s what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1.)

MarsEdit 1.1b5 is the first public beta of MarsEdit 1.1.

You can download it from the beta page.

The main goal of 1.1 is to handle the most common bug reports and feature requests. Highlights include titles for Blogger sites, an easy way to choose preview text filters, editing dates and enclosures (including podcasts), Technorati tags support, and more. It also includes a bit of silly, harmless fun.

Here’s what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1. Also see inessential.com for more details.

Update 4:45 p.m.: Here’s Gus Mueller (who’s been working on MarsEdit) on MarsEdit 1.1b5.

david’s brain blog: “Well, I had an unused wordpress.com blog and a morning free to do some applescripting so I knocked up a quick script to take the current post I am reading in NetNewsWire and post it (via Marsedit) to my wordpress.com blog.”

Gus Mueller, of Flying Meat—of VoodooPad, FlySketch, and FlyGesture fame—is now working on MarsEdit 1.1, so that we can move MarsEdit and NetNewsWire forward at the same time. More details on inessential.com. (MarsEdit 1.1 will be a free upgrade for MarsEdit users.)

As reported on The Unofficial Apple Weblog and at Ars Technica, we have decided to continue MarsEdit development at NewsGator! For more details, see inessential.com.

CocoaRadio: “Brent talks about his path to becoming a Cocoa developer, use of the Cocoa frameworks, UI focused design, and offers some tips to those interested in learning Cocoa and Obj-C.”

Pixel Meadow: XRT lets MarsEdit users post to Textpattern weblogs via XML-RPC.

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.

The weblog password used by MarsEdit is stored in Keychain so it remains there even if the weblog is deleted. However, you can manually delete it in Keychain Access.

1. Quit MarsEdit if it is running.
2. Launch Keychain Access (Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access)
3. Look for MarsEdit:[your username]
4. You can edit it within Keychain Access or delete this item and then MarsEdit will ask you for a new username/password when you recreate the weblog.

Trac: “Typo is an absolutely minimal weblogging engine which comes without an admin interface.”

Here at Ranchero we haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but it sounds pretty cool, and we keep hearing from people who like it very much.

Tim Putnam has posted a new xml-rpc patch that fixes a number of issues for people using MarsEdit to edit Serendipity weblogs.

This is just to clear up some confusion about pricing that people have...

NetNewsWire 2.0 (in beta at the time of this writing) is $24.95. Once it ships, it will still be $24.95—this is its normal price.

MarsEdit is a separate product: it also costs $24.95.

You can buy NetNewsWire and MarsEdit together for $39.95, which saves about $10.

To be clear:

NetNewsWire 2.0..............$24.95
MarsEdit 1.0.................$24.95
NetNewsWire/MarsEdit bundle..$39.95

(NetNewsWire 1.0.8, which is still for sale for now, costs $39.95. I think that’s where the confusion comes from. The older version of NetNewsWire costs more because it includes a weblog editor as well as the aggregator.)

If you have any questions about pricing, please send email to info@ranchero.com.

Garrick Van Buren: “It takes any selected text and appends a ‘(t)’ to it linking to the corresponding tag at Technorati, or a ‘(d)’ for del.icio.us tags, or both. For example: MarsEdit (t), Applescript (t d).”

UserLand Product News: “The MetaWeblog API in Manila has been updated to add support for the metaWeblogApi.newMediaObject. If the object is a picture, it’s posted as a new picture. If it’s another type, it’s posted as a gem.”

The DrunkenBlog interview on NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Apple’s dark years, frisbees, user interface, and coffee.

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.”

Laura Lemay: “As part of this whole tagging experiment I wrote a little applescript for MarsEdit to automatically insert the ‘Technorati Tags’ HTML at the bottom of each post... After installing it, you use it by tagging your post and then just choosing the script from the Script menu.”

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.)

Jeff Harrell interviewed Brent Simmons about NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, syndication, and Macworld Expo rumors.

MarsEdit makes weblog writing like writing email, with each post edited in its own window, the ability to save posts as drafts, spell-checking, and a familiar Mac OS X interface.

While designed to be easy to use for new webloggers, MarsEdit also includes features power-bloggers need: support for categories, text filters, trackbacks, custom templates, AppleScript, and more.

Other MarsEdit features include image and file uploading, a bookmarklet that lets you send a page from your Web browser to MarsEdit, and custom tags.

MarsEdit works with a variety of weblog systems, including Movable Type, TypePad, Radio UserLand, WordPress, Blosxom, and many others.

It also works with NetNewsWire and other newsreaders for OS X that include a post-to-weblog feature. The newsreader’s post-to-weblog command can be used to send a news item to MarsEdit, where it can be commented on and then posted to a weblog.

MarsEdit costs $24.95 for a single-user license and $19.95 per person for a multi-user license. It’s available bundled with NetNewsWire 2.0 beta for $39.95.

If you bought (or will buy) any NetNewsWire 1.x version, MarsEdit 1.0 and all MarsEdit 1.x releases are free.

James Walker: “I have noticed some rumblings (like here) about people having trouble posting to drupal powered sites using MarsEdit. Specifically, MarsEdit recognize drupal’s category support. Here’s how to make it work.”

inessential.com: As you might imagine, we’ve been getting lots of feature requests and bug reports for MarsEdit. Here are some of the main things we’ve been hearing from people—and what the plan is.”

Kevin Sheridan posted some scripts that make it so you can blog using ecto, ecto 2, and MarsEdit from AquaMinds NoteTaker: “The mere fact you’re visiting this site means I know what you’re thinking: How does NoteTaker get along with Ecto2 and MarsEdit? Are you sitting down? Good.”

Eric Blair posted a script which creates a new MarsEdit post from the frontmost BBEdit window.

inessential.com: MarsEdit user interface notes: “In order to improve both NetNewsWire and the weblog editor, we needed to induce mitosis.”

Henri Bergius posted a page on using weblog editors with Midgard CMS: “I've now tested the system with two desktop blogging tools for Mac OS X, ecto and MarsEdit, and it works quite well.”

Donovan Watts wrote a tutorial on using MarsEdit to edit a Radio UserLand weblog. (We love Donovan’s domain name, by the way: becomethemedia.org.)

On inessential.com we posted answers to some frequently asked questions about the public betas of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit.

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