I’m so pleased to hear that MarsEdit has been acquired by Red Sweater Software.

I love MarsEdit, I use it to write for my various blogs (I’ve got 5 on the go at the moment), it does exactly what I want without fuss, and even some features of Feeder have been, er, inspired by MarsEdit – particularly early on.

Congratulations to Daniel Jalkut, I’m glad to see this app find a new home. Brent Simmons did an excellent job, but for a while now his time has been understandably consumed by NetNewsWire, another of my favourite apps. So, it’s great to see this MarsEdit has a secure future.

Keep It Together 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and improvements. Here are the highlights:

Tags and Ratings

You can now add searchable tags to items along with star ratings. These are both really quick and easy ways to help sift through your data.

You can add tags to items in the Info drawer and search for them in the main window. Ratings can be applied both in the Info drawer and items list.

And of course, both tags and ratings can be used in Smart Groups too.

PDF Service, Dragging Links, Hot Key

There are now three new ways KIT can work more conveniently with other applications.

You can now print PDFs to KIT from within any application. Just choose “Save PDF to KIT” from the PDF menu in the standard print sheet.

A much requested feature was the ability to toggle between creating a web archive or a bookmark when dragging a link, overriding the default preference. This can now be achieved by holding on the Option key to create a web archive or the Control key to create a bookmark when dragging a link.

For convenience, KIT can now be brought to the front using a hot key, which can be set in its General preferences.

User Experience

There are small changes to the user interface. The status bar (“1 of 10 items selected”) is gone, because I saw it as a waste of space. Instead, this information is shown in the main window’s title bar. There is also an option to show the item counts for each group in the View Options panel.

Also added to the View Options panel is a setting “Size Columns to Fit”. Disabling this prevents the item list columns from resizing to fit the window. In KIT 1.2, when columns were sized so that you could scroll horizontally, those settings would be lost when you relaunched.

Finally, KIT now supports Growl, so will post notifications when importing and exporting files.

There are many more changes, all of which are listed in the release notes.

The Future

I received a lot of feedback from KIT 1.2 and I’ve tried to add the most popular feature requests in this release. There is a lot more I want to do to KIT, particularly improvements with Spotlight integration, searching and a whole host of other features.

Update: Oops, there was a small problem in KIT 1.3 where it may not launch properly. Another version is uploaded now that should fix this – click to download. It only happens if you’re missing the “PDF Services” folder in your Library folder.

Anton Linecker has written an interesting piece for Macworld, using Feeder to demonstrate how to create a password-protected podcast feed on .Mac:

Password protected podcasts with .Mac

I released Feeder 1.4 today and thought I could give a quick guide to the new features here.

Scheduled Publishing

Feeder can now schedule feeds for publication and can even wake your computer from sleep to do that. It’s simple to schedule a feed to be published: tell Feeder to publish future items automatically in the Publishing section of the Info drawer then give an item in your feed a publication date in the future.

There are a couple of other options there, too. One is to “Always Publish” future items – that is the default and will give you behaviour like Feeder 1.3, where everything in your feed was uploaded regardless of its publication date and “Never Publish”, where items with dates in the future aren’t published until they become due. “Publish Automatically” behaves the same as “Never Publish” when the feed is published manually.

Also, all feeds now publish in the background. This works better with the scheduled publishing and prevents the main window from being tied up when uploading large files (e.g. podcast media files). It also means you can publish more that one feed at a time.

Editing Improvements

Feeder now automatically adds paragraphs and line breaks to the HTML Description field, making editing much easier.

Feeder is now also much more smart about when to update an item’s publication date, and will leave those alone for changes to already published or scheduled items.

Feeder also now includes support for the Dublin Core creator tag, often used by blogs, etc to have an author name that doesn’t need an email address. The field will automatically be shown in feeds that use the “News” or “Podcasting” (non-iTunes) template, otherwise you need to edit the feed’s template to display it, like so:

• Choose Item > Edit Template from the menu.
• Click Customize if it’s not already disabled.
• Choose Show: “Dublin Core” from the pop-up menu.
• Check Use next to the pop-up and check the Creator field to have it displayed in the editing windows.

Sparkle Appcasting

Sparkle is an excellent framework that can be used by developers to give applications self-updating functionality. It’s used by a number of apps, including both of mine, and uses an RSS feed to get the latest version information. This works much like a podcast, but with downloadable applications rather than media files, hence the name “appcast”.

To enhance this experience, Sparkle introduces some additional tags that can be used in the feed and Feeder now supports all of these. Feeder will check whether a feed already uses the Sparkle extensions when the feed is imported and for existing feeds there is a Sparkle Appcasting template. You can use this template by choosing Item > Edit Template from the menu and choosing the template from the list.

When the Sparkle extensions are in use, Feeder will show a preview of the release notes as they will appear in Sparkle’s update alert.

By default, only the Sparkle Version field is shown, but all fields are supported. Customize the template to show more:

• Choose Item > Edit Template from the menu.
• Click Customize if it’s not already disabled.
• Choose Show: “Sparkle” from the pop-up menu.
• Check the fields you want to show.

The Sparkle documentation and Feeder’s help files include advice on which fields to use (Feeder’s help files probably cover the non-Sparkle fields in more detail).

Developers wishing to buy Feeder for Sparkle appcasts should get in touch to receive a discount code that can be used when checking out.

For anyone interested, I have started another blog (oh no!) with my friend, occasional Reinvented Software helper and User Experience Designer, Hans Kim, called CocoaDust.

The idea of CocoaDust is to cover more technical things such as Mac and web software development, industry commentary, software we use, what it’s like being an indie Mac developer, etc.

I’ll still cover various topics specific to Reinvented Software here as they arise, it just feels better talking about the more hardcore things somewhere else. If you’re interested, check it out – the first post should explain the idea in full.