MarsEdit 2.1 Released

Earlier today Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater released a huge update to MarsEdit 2. This update brings about tons of new features that users (including myself) have been asking for. Summarizing the new features: a search for local drafts and published posts, capsule-based tagging, server drafts, performance enhancements, and a dramatic change in the preview window.

The toolbar of the main MarsEdit window now includes a search field that will search the content of all the local drafts and published posts. The content it searches with are title, tag, category, and body text.

The enhanced tag support involves re-creating the tag field to use capsule-based text. This means that it also memorizes all the tags you’ve used for future use. The tag support was also extended to allow real WordPress (2.3.x+) support. The tag support for Moveable Type is new in MarsEdit 2.1, where the tag support for WordPress was just made possible with the tag field, and not being required to use the Keywords field. However, I ran into a bug where you needed to go into the weblog settings and re-auto detect the settings to make the support active.

The server drafts support that’s new in MarsEdit 2.1 is fairly flaky. Really only Blogger has full support for it and Moveable Type and Wordpress have workarounds. This is, however, the most wanted new feature in this update according to Daniel’s account of new feature requests he’s gotten in the past months.

The preview window in MarsEdit has gotten quite a large change. Unlike in earlier versions of MarsEdit, the preview window is now fully integrated as a WebKit window. Therefore the deficiencies we’ve seen with the lack of plugins (thus YouTube embedments) and other HTML stuff is now fixed. The basic look of the previews is also more like a blog page and less like plain text.

On top of those main ones a way to add categories from MarsEdit is included, a grammer checking preference exists, a text markup contextual menu, and autosaving performance has been enhanced. So, all users of MarsEdit 2 should take this huge update, just reopen MarsEdit and it will alert you of the update. Enjoy, Alex.