I knew, taking over the app, that I was coming into an existing user base where a bunch of these people really admired Brent's work. It was a situation where, as young as the product was, it already had passionate user base. It's not like finding this relic that you need to polish up and turn into something marketable. It wasn't like buying this thing out of obscurity. To me it was great because I acquired MarsEdit, and it was already this thing that I help up as this great thing. Rene: What was it like making MarsEdit your own, Daniel? Taking on the code, did you try to work with it the best you could? Did you start replacing things right away? What was that process like?ĭaniel: It was a very gradual process. I've been using MarsEdit probably as long as anybody other than Brent Simmons. I started using it as soon as he issued a beta, because I've known Brent forever. Maybe he kept some code just for talking to the APIs, but in terms of what the app looked like and the way it worked it was a completely different idea. When he spun off the app into its own app, MarsEdit, he pretty much scrapped everything. Daniel, maybe you remember this, but I think that Brent had a UserLand-inspired idea that the built-in blog editor would be, Dave Winer style, an outliner. It was compatible with Movable Type, the back end of "Daring Fireball." I think Brent realized it was terrible. I don't even remember what was terrible about it. I do remember that the blog editor in NetNewsWire was terrible and I never used it. That was the basic kernel of an idea for putting a blog editor in NetNewsWire. You want an email program where you can read and write. You wouldn't have an email program where you could only read email. I think that Brent's analogy was that it should be like an email program. I do remember that it started as a NetNewsWire feature, and I do remember Brent's loose idea of if you can read blogs, you should be able to write blogs. Gruber: I had to go back so I could remember it. Thank god, I have a blog that goes back far enough. Gruber: When it was in beta, when Brent was developing it. Rene: When did you get started with MarsEdit, John? I did version 2, version 3, and then spent about seven years, I don't know what I was doing. That was MarsEdit 1.1 when I acquired it. That was in 2007, so it's been 10-plus years of me driving the development of MarsEdit. I didn't acquire it from Brent Simmons, but it basically felt like that was what I was doing. When his new company, NewsGator, the company that acquired everything said they didn't want to keep MarsEdit around, he hooked me up with them. They weren't so interested in the blog editor thing.Ĭrediting the fact that we knew each other online, you meet people in person, and get a different kind of bond, and a different level of trust, and know people better. He ended up selling his whole company to a company called NewsGator, and they wanted NetNewsWire. I believe yesterday, Sunday the 10th, was the 13-year-anniversary of MarsEdit as an app. The funny thing is, we're recording this on Monday, December 11th, 2017. He was slowly working his way towards becoming B-Max.ĭaniel: He split off MarsEdit at some point. It probably had a chess game in there somewhere. To be fair, as well, he also thought you should have an outliner. I think Brent thought, "If you can read blogs with this thing, you should be able to write blogs with it."ĭaniel: Yeah. MarsEdit, first of all, goes back to NetNewsWire. It just goes on and on.īrent Simmons was among the people I met at that C40, which I think was 2006. Speaking of John, John and I met in person for the first time at that conference, Gus Mueller, Wolf Rentzsch, Craig Hockenberry, I think. That's when I went from being this Mac developer who knew a bunch of people online to a Mac developer who had suddenly just met a hundred of them all in one place. A lot of my history with MarsEdit I think I can trace back to the very first C4 conference in Chicago. I was a passionate, avid user of the app and followed Brent's work. Rene: Daniel, what's the background on MarsEdit, for those people who weren't familiar with how you basically stuck up Brent Simmons one day and took it out of his back pocket?ĭaniel: I started using MarsEdit, I think, back in about 2005, when I was a pretty early, to me, in my history of blogging, that was early days for me. John Gruber was kind enough to volunteer. I thought we'd have you on to talk about the new version of MarsEdit, and we'd find someone, anyone, who could talk about using it a lot. I wanted to do this thing where we did it last time with Greg Pierce and Merlin Mann on someone who makes an app and someone who just uses the hell out of that app. Rene: I say, welcome back, as though I just subsumed the entire debug run into this show, which I probably shouldn't be doing, but it feels that way internally.
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