The great desktop blogging app for Mac MarsEdit is out with version 5.0 and some timely new features. MarsEdit 5 comes out almost exactly five years after the last major release, and includes a redesigned icon to match the rest of the Mac dock.
MarsEdit 5 Developer Daniel Jalkut thanks Mac Community Designer Brad Ellis for the new app icon. It continues the awesome rocket-over-the-red planet theme, but matches the current Apple icon style on macOS.
No mention of MarsEdit for iOS, but this icon can be easily adapted for iPhone and iPad. I can imagine blogging about Apple from Mars on the iPad by the end of this decade – if Stage Manager is sorted out by then.
Back to the current timeline. MarsEdit 5 scanned the room and noticed that bloggers don't always sit at a table with a medium or long history. People with opinions and observations have been trained in modern social media posting formats (like botched Twitter) to keep ideas concise and easy to share.
MarsEdit 5 introduces a Micropost panel that can be activated with a system-wide keyboard shortcut, so posting a thought to your blog can be as easy as making a joke on the timeline. While the rest of MarsEdit is a complete blogging canvas, the Micropost panel is set up for speed with a text field and an optional title field. Future updates to the Micropost panel will add photo and video attachments.
MarsEdit 5 also introduces a significant quality of life improvement for writers who prefer Markdown for text formatting. Admittedly, I am a basic rich text editor, but I fully understand the appeal of Markdown (especially when compared to HTML). MarsEdit was already a full-featured blogging application for writers using Markdown to format posts. The app either sent the Markdown text to your blog or automatically converted it to HTML when you posted it. What's new in MarsEdit 5 is Markdown syntax highlighting, so words can appear **bold** or _italic_ in MarsEdit, for example, when you're writing.
If you're like me and map keyboard shortcuts to rich text formatting for hyperlinking and styling, MarsEdit 5 has something for you too. This is a hidden jump to “WebKit2” it should not affect daily use. However, this change in how text formatting works behind the scenes is an investment in the future of MarsEdit and how the application uses modern technology. Jalkut explains for non-developers like me in the MarsEdit 5 launch blog post. This is what you appreciate more when you follow the development of MarsEdit and Micro.blog in Daniel Jalkut and Manton Rees' Core Intuition podcast.
Here is the full changelog for MarsEdit 5:
- Paid upgrade from 4.0
- Updated app icon with a modern style appropriate for the latest version of macOS.
- New Markdown syntax highlighting in text mode.
- Advanced editor is now based on modern WebKit2 for better performance and reliability.
- New calendar-based date editor that changes post dates
- New built-in find/replace interface used throughout the application
- Support for insert photos and thumbnails directly from iPhone or iPad
- Many small fixes here and there
< li>New “Micropost” interface for easier posting of short messages
MarsEdit 5.0 is available as a one-time purchase for $59.95. You can try it for 14 days for free. MarsEdit 4 users can upgrade for $29.95, while MarsEdit 5 is a free upgrade for MarsEdit 4 customers who purchased the app between June 1, 2022 and today. The new update will be available soon on the Mac App Store as well as on Setapp.
