Tuesday, June 05, 2007

MarsEdit: how not to distribute software

MarsEdit is a blog editor for OS X. In the XP world Microsoft's free Live Writer has crushed the competition, but the OS X world is wide open. MarsEdit should have a niche. I'm the perfect candidate for them since I blog a lot, prefer to use dedicated editors and I buy software. Happily. When I know it's good.

I downloaded MarsEdit and tried to run it. Nope, my trial has expired. I'd tried an earlier version, years ago, and it clearly wasn't ready for use. Apparently, that's all the trial I'll ever get.

This is so dumb it's sad. Each significant update, at the very least, should have a renewed trial period. Best of all:
1. New trial period for each major release.
2. Trial period is 30 uses, not 15 days.
3. After end of trial period can still try the app again, but now it's limited -- so you you can test it but not exploit it.
I'm still waiting for someone to clone Microsoft's Live Writer ...

Update 6/6/07: Hoisted from the comments:
For now, if you're still interested in giving it another spin, you should be able to get a fresh start by removing the Application Support and Preferences file for MarsEdit:
[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit
and
[Home] -> Library -> Preferences -> com.ranchero.marsedit.plist
I'll give it another try!

Update 6/11/07: The good news is I was able to try it out, and it did an excellent job fetching blogger posts. The lesser bad news is that you can't save as draft to blogger, drafts are local to the file system. The bigger bad news is that it's not a wysiwyg editor, it's an html editor that doesn't emulate paragraphs. For my purposes Camino with Blogger's native editing controls is a better option.

2 comments:

Daniel Jalkut said...

Hi Gordon - you're right, the trial system is a bit messed up in this regard. I'm going to work on a better system in the future.

For now, if you're still interested in giving it another spin, you should be able to get a fresh start by removing the Application Support and Preferences file for MarsEdit:

[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit

and

[Home] -> Library -> Preferences -> com.ranchero.marsedit.plist

Thanks for writing about this and giving me the chance to respond :)

JGF said...

I'll give it a try, thanks for responding. I updated my post to include your comment, which should put ME in a better light.