Quick followup on my day with MarsEdit. The big takeaway was that I’m a colossal dope for forgetting it existed. Some apps are terrible. Most are simply “not right for your present needs” or, at worst, “clearly written by a serious and dedicated team, but not quite ready yet.”
I was a little amused when WordPress (which itself has come a long way) did the helpful thing I’d told it to do, and automatically found and linked other blogposts I’d written that talked about MarsEdit or blogging apps. In 2007…nnnno, clearly MarsEdit wasn’t right for me, for whatever reason.
I’m digging the hell out of it in 2015, though. It’s super-quick to just flash out a post. Is it because of the simplified, bespoke app, or is it simply because of my mindset? Who knows and I don’t care.
My friend (and MarsEdit developer) Daniel Jalkut offered to send me out a new promo/review code. I don’t need one. I downloaded the free 30-day trial direct from the app site — you can do that when you’re not selling it through Apple’s App Store — and if I’m still using it in a couple of weeks, I will be happy to pay him $40 for a license.
I feel like I’m doing a good thing when I pay a proper amount of money for a great app. As a way of saying “I like and respect the work that you’ve done,” throwing money at someone is a facile solution. But not all facile solutions have the side effect of allowing someone to go out for a nice dinner.
MarsEdit isn’t the ideal that I had imagined. What I really want is a system-wide hotkey. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, tapping it causes a little note card window to pop up. I type a few sentences, maybe click a Twitter-style icon button to drop in a photo or paste in a link (which the app automatically grabs from the frontmost browser window), click the “Post” button, and then I’m back to what I was doing before I had this brilliant idea for a quick post.
The distraction of the WordPress webapp is a problem for me. I can’t count the number of times when I’d intended to just post a link to an interesting article, but then spent an hour writing 2000 words.
Sometimes, I’d read it back and think “Oh, neat…that’ll do for my next column.” But it’s not helping me form, sharpen, and then let go of a thought quickly. I admire and envy the authors of Sixcolors and Daring Fireball and The Loop, I’m proud of my longform stuff but wish I could develop the kind of skills required to maintain a frequently-updated blog. I’ve got the people who like to read long pieces but I’m doing nothing to help people who like to read lots of shorter things, too.
“Envy” isn’t a shameful thing if you remove the “jealousy and anger” component and pack the void they leave behind with Inspiration and Ambition. So I’m grateful to Jason Snell, John Gruber, and Jim Dalrymple for their fine examples.
