By Dan Moren

December 5, 2017 2:35 PM PT

MarsEdit 4 updates interface, adds Safari Extension and more

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Something about the Mac seems to lend itself to longevity where software is concerned. More than a few of the apps I use every day have been around for years on end. In the case of MarsEdit, I was using the blog-posting software more than a decade ago in my earliest days of posting to the MacUser blog. At Macworld, I was forced to take a hiatus as our CMS wasn’t compatible with the app, but since Six Colors has been a going concern, I’ve been back on the bandwagon.

Which makes me all the more glad to see version 4.0 come down the pike today. The update from Red Sweater Software¹ brings a handful of welcome new features and a fresh coat of paint. Among the most prominent additions: a better rich-text editor format bar, improved WordPress support, and the ability to download the entire history of published posts and pages from your blog. (Which would have been super handy when I moved my own blog earlier this year!) There’s also a brand new extension for Safari that makes it easy to send a page into MarsEdit for posting. 

Personally, one of my favorite features is the beefed-up support for previewing templates. Rather than spending your own time to try and adapt your website into a template, MarsEdit can automatically download and convert your site’s design into a template in a matter of seconds. Also a huge boon: support at last for macOS’s built-in autosave features, so you never have to worry about losing a draft again.

Frankly, if you’re doing any sort of regular, serious blog-posting from a Mac, and you aren’t using MarsEdit, I’m not sure what’s going on with you. Did I mention there’s a spiffy new icon?

You can get MarsEdit from the Mac App Store or directly from Red Sweater Software’s store. A license is $50, but if you purchased MarsEdit 3 before June 1 of this year, you can upgrade for just $25; if you purchased it after June 1, your version 4 upgrade is free—and that applies to those who bought it from the Mac App Store as well.

In a new move, MarsEdit 4 is a 14-day fully-featured trial no matter where you download it. Once those 14 days are up, you’ll still be able to use all the features of the app except for posting to the web. Which means if you download all your posts into MarsEdit, you can still use it as an archive without the worry you’ll lose your data.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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