MarsEdit Meets Tumblr

Many of you have been waiting patiently for MarsEdit 2.3, featuring support for Tumblr. Today, I'm happy to release a public beta with these updates. Please feel free to download and give it a try! I would also value your feedback on what I've done so far.

Click Here To Download MarsEdit 2.3 Public Beta

Special note for current MarsEdit users: It's a good idea to make a backup of your current MarsEdit Application Support folder. You'll find it in your home directory at:

[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit

For this initial Tumblr support, I have only endeavored to support the Text, Quote, Photo, Link, and Chat post types. Audio and video are on the list for a future enhancement.

While the emphasis of this release is on Tumblr, there are a few goodies that will benefit those of you who are using MarsEdit on other blog systems as well:

• Opening the media manager is now much faster with lots of photos
• Improved usability and design of the Technorati Tags editor
• Improved weblog Favicon detection

Tumblr Caveats

I think there is enough here to get people excited about using MarsEdit for Tumblr, and hopefully you won't run in to many pitfalls. But there are a few things that I already know are working less than perfectly.

• Post options such as selecting between Markdown and HTML , and setting whether a post is public or private, are not yet supported. I hope to support these in an update sometime after 2.3 ships.
• Autodetection of weblog settings fails if you host on a custom domain name. To work around this, give MarsEdit your tumblr-based URL, e.g. "http://marsedit.tumblr.com/". I am working with the Tumblr folks to see if we can facilitate a way for MarsEdit to autodetect settings from a custom domain name.
• Only the first tumblelog for an account can be edited with MarsEdit. The Tumblr API has come a long way in recent months, but it is missing the capacity to specify a particular blog to edit when submitting or editing a post.

Have Fun And Keep In Touch

I hope you'll give this new release of MarsEdit a try, and take the time to send me your feedback if you've got it. I'm not aiming for perfection with 2.3, but usable and lovable would be a good start. I appreciate your help in getting us there!