Disqus - Latest Comments for Daniel Jalkut

Re: It’s no wonder people think Mac’s are elitists

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:44:09 -0000

Hi there! This is Daniel Jalkut, the developer of MarsEdit.

I agree with you that Windows Live Writer is a stellar example of Windows application design. I am not too familiar with the entire PC market, but I'm extremely impressed with Windows Live Writer.

As for the pricing disparity, it would be a lot easier for me give my application away for free if I was a multi-billion dollar corporation and could view the application as some kind of strategic leverage point as opposed to a means of making a living :)

Daniel

Re: It’s no wonder people think Mac’s are elitists

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:18:36 -0000

Gotcha - yeah, it's not worth beating up a particular platform just for the sake of it. As a Mac developer, obviously there are reasons I prefer the platform and think that it makes it easier to achieve great apps. But there's no reason that great apps can't also exist on the PC.

Re: Ply It Forward

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:48:55 -0000

Depends on the flavor of your personal hygiene paranoia. I would consider the pre-dispensed paper "suspect" and possibly not clean enough to wipe my hands on.

Re: Windows Live Writer Wrocks

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:30:40 -0000

Windows Live Writer is awesome. It's great that Microsoft is pushing the blog client market so strongly. Imagine if they were working/investing so diligently in the podcast arena?

What's especially great about WLW is Joe Cheng, the main developer I know of who works on it, is a really nice guy and a pleasure to work with as part of the larger community of desktop client developers.

Needless to say there are things MarsEdit can learn from other apps, and WLW is definitely one of the most interesting client apps being developed on Windows. Who knows for sure how everything will evolve over the coming years, but I think Microsoft's commitment helps validate desktop blogging as an important technology for all platforms.

Daniel

Re: Windows Live Writer Wrocks

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:50:54 -0000

Aw shucks, thanks Leo :)

Re: First Look At Leopard

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:12:25 -0000

Definitely SpamSieve still works. Just make sure to "reinstall" the plugin from SpamSieve. This was just a conservative precaution on Apple's part.

Re: Vlogging

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:26:47 -0000

Hah! It's humbling to see the master of audio broadcasting stumbling for words on video. I guess that's what happens to anybody when they're not sure what they're supposed to say.

A nice glimpse into "everyday Leo" life perhaps...

Re: Windows Live Writer Wrocks

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:30:40 -0000

Re: Windows Live Writer Wrocks

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:50:54 -0000

Aw shucks, thanks Leo :)

Re: First Look At Leopard

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:12:25 -0000

Definitely SpamSieve still works. Just make sure to "reinstall" the plugin from SpamSieve. This was just a conservative precaution on Apple's part.

Re: Wordpress for iPhone released

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:05:08 -0000

With MarsEdit at least, you can set the "Post Status" of a post (from the options panel). If you set it to Draft, it will be sent to WordPress as a "server draft" (not local). Then, if you refresh from another client it shows up in the posts list, can be edited, and resubmitted.

Daniel

Re: Wordpress for iPhone released

Daniel Jalkut — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:11:06 -0000

Glad to hear the workaround was helpful. You know, I'm not really sure about the statistics off the top of my head. I've been collecting statistics (voluntary from users), but have not compiled them and evaluated them in quite a while. Maybe it's time to do so once again.

Last time I looked, I just measured popularity of systems, and at that time it was confirmed for me that WordPress was far and away the most popular among my users.

Daniel

Re: Off-Topic

Daniel Jalkut — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:24:54 -0000

Thanks, John, for responding to my argument. I disagree that the XMLRPC interface is "an obvious hole." Because it's a single URL through which any client must provide authentication for *each and every transaction*, it's a pretty secure and small hole, compared to the wide variety of URLs which a user can do harm through via the web interface.

In summary, I would like to see measures purported to increase security tackle actually weak points. So far nobody has shown me any evidence that the XMLRPC or AtomPub interfaces to WordPress are (any longer?) a weak point.

In light of the massive number of possible vulnerabilities in a given WP install, to focus in on just the remote access interfaces seems a bit perplexing to me. Which is why I think the question of security needs to be considered at a higher level. Just throwing solutions without knowing the problem will lead to confusion, and probably not actually solve any of the problems.

Re: Summary of my saturday - Officially Lucky, a blog by Clint Ecker

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:21:52 -0000

As a newb to the Northeast, I assumed for several months that it was pronounced "Caboh" ... like ... French. Now I enjoy pronouncing it that way all the time...

Re: Universal Health Care protester gets beat up, needs donations because he'd lost his job and doesn't have health care. — Officially Lucky

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:28:05 -0000

It sucks that the individual is so ignorant that he doesn't realize he would be better off under a reformed health system. But the irony of his situation doesn't approach the irony of being beaten up by somebody claiming to be fighting for health care for all.

Re: Review: Marsedit 2 vs. ecto 3 Beta

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:34:03 -0000

Hi Art - thanks for giving both MarsEdit and Ecto such a thorough try. I appreciate your attention to detail. Here's an interesting thought for why Adriaan and I don't need to compete too intensely with each other: 99% of bloggers are still using the web interface.

If we compete against each other we're just fighting over 1%. I'm much more interested in getting more people off the web interfaces and on to the desktop. Glad to hear that you've been won over :)

Daniel

Re: An Idea for an Application

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:34:59 -0000

Just because I don't have the time to put into a new project right now, doesn't mean other developers might not be excited to hear about the idea and possibly pursue it with you.

Re: Testing out Ecto

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:47:05 -0000

Hi there - I hope you'll decide to give MarsEdit a spin! It's true it costs a bit more than Ecto, but depending on what you're looking for, it might turn out to be a better deal after all ;)

Ecto is definitely a great product and has its own strengths. Try them both and see which works best for you!

Daniel Jalkut
Founder, Red Sweater Software

Re: Goodbye Cocoa

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:28:10 -0000

Hi there! Two things:

I'm really glad to read any blog post where the appreciation for what goes into a product like MarsEdit is celebrated ;)

In addition to being the developer of MarsEdit, I'm also the organizer of the Boston-area CocoaHeads group. I am dismayed to learn that you got such a cold reaction to "newbie" questions at a CocoaHeads meeting. At our group you probably wouldn't have had such a cold experience. I agree the mentality on the mailing lists is often very cold and discouraging, but that's exactly the opposite from what I think many CocoaHeads chapters are aiming for.

I applaud you for giving Cocoa programming a go. Give it a try again when you get inspired again. Many of the things that seemed difficult the first time may seem easy the second time through. It's true that getting a large application to behave as you expect is a monumental task, but it gets done one step at a time, as with anything in life.

Daniel

Re: Not terribly impressed with Drupal

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:43:21 -0000

Hey Paul - glad you got things working. If you download the latest MarsEdit, 1.1.7, you'll find that it works out of the box with "Drupal" as the selection from the popup menu.

Enjoy!

Daniel Jalkut
Red Sweater Software

Re: Not terribly impressed with Drupal

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:43:21 -0000

Re: Not terribly impressed with Drupal

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:43:21 -0000

Re: AquaticPrime Warning

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:50:18 -0000

Greg points out that the "marketing" of AquaticPrime emphasizes security. I agree that given the language of the website, I would assume that there isn't a simple hack that can be installed that makes all such protected apps suddenly spring open.

It's fine to argue that Aquatic doesn't need to be secure against "binary attacks," but if that's the case, why bother with a long unwieldy public encryption license? Why not just encode the user's name or email in the license like most of the "naive yet unique" key generation algorithms do?

It seems like the work that went into making Aquatic secure is comical if you can stand back, flip a switch and watch doomsday unfold.

I was hoping that the result of this post would be that Aquatic's author would take to heart the idea that changes (perhaps simple ones) should be made to make it at least a bit harder for a "entire class of applications cracked" type hack to be distributed.

Re: Grab that Invocation

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:19:49 -0000

Nice work! One possible enhancement might be to change the invocation "capture" so that it can record multiples on an array. Then the client could ask for an array of all invocations sent to it. It could even sport a "performInvocationsOnObject:" method.

Also, the name "CInvocationRecorder" might better represent what this thing does, especially if multi-recording was added.

Re: I would like to thank…

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 01:15:12 -0000

Congratulations, Jon!

Re: TouchCode Usage

Daniel Jalkut — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:20:22 -0000

Cool stuff. Thanks for making these available.

I wonder if you might want to change the NSXMLDocument reference from "based on" to "inspired by"... it sort of makes it sound like the library is literally built on NSXMLDocument.

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:06:50 -0000

Hi Josh - I'm glad to see you're giving such a thorough test of MarsEdit.

I'm curious which HTML in particular ecto deemed dirty? It might be a matter of taste :) But you can also edit any of the built-in markup macros to use the HTML of your own preference.

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:06:50 -0000

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:06:50 -0000

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:06:50 -0000

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:42:24 -0000

There is a lot of room for improvement with the image handling. Can't make any specific promises on timing but it's something I want to improve soon.

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:42:24 -0000

There is a lot of room for improvement with the image handling. Can't make any specific promises on timing but it's something I want to improve soon.

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:42:24 -0000

There is a lot of room for improvement with the image handling. Can't make any specific promises on timing but it's something I want to improve soon.

Re: Meta Meta

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:42:24 -0000

There is a lot of room for improvement with the image handling. Can't make any specific promises on timing but it's something I want to improve soon.

Re: MarsEdit Feature “Comments”

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:15:12 -0000

Thanks for the ideas. I am reading ;)

Lots of what you're suggesting is on my radar already. Some of them are finer points I haven't noticed but will log in my bug system (e.g. tags that don't get sent to the blog shouldn't be saved in history).

As for the tags from old posts, this is something that would be easier if the blog systems did a better job of exposing them all in one spot. Generally speaking MarsEdit can't get at an easy to access list of all the tags ever used. As a compromise, I want to add functionality to at least collect tags from the posts that are refreshed, but of course that only covers the last "N" posts...

Daniel

Re: MarsEdit Feature “Comments”

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:15:12 -0000

Re: MarsEdit Feature “Comments”

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:15:12 -0000

Re: MarsEdit Feature “Comments”

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:15:12 -0000

Re: Everything Buckets

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:02:20 -0000

A good compromise for somebody like Alex, assuming he's not hell-bent on avoiding technology that might make his life easier, is EagleFiler from Michael Tsai:

http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/

One of the core philosophies of that software is to use the file system as a the backing database for the "everything" ... so a lot of Alex's arguments about database corruption, etc, go out the window.

His arguments seem to condense down to two points: some data management apps demand format lock-in, and if you try hard enough, you can invent your own solution for just about anything. The former is not true of all apps, as EagleFiler testifies, and the latter is technically true, but usually a complete waste of time and energy.

Re: Everything Buckets

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:05:33 -0000

Oh yeah, I hate to hit him where it hurts, but I don't see why anybody would use Twitter when you can replicate the functionality with email and a sufficiently diverse address book.

Re: Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: Don’t keep calm and carry on. (via moleitau)

Daniel Jalkut — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:44:01 -0000

Cool logo. I like the unlikely royalizing of working class tools.

Re: Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: iPhone Stencil Kit (via exmilitary)

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:01:59 -0000

My first reaction is also ... WOW this is awesome! But then the idea that some of those tiny stencils would actually be useful except with a laser becomes a little less obvious :)

It's a really cool artifact, though.

Re: Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: Think you’re tough? Try designing & developing...

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:39:13 -0000

My hackles were raised by the suggestion that anybody could have truly been offended by the metaphorical comparison of software difficulty to triathlon athleticism. I was glad to come here and see EVRT's comments rescinding the (apparent?) venom. The original link doesn't point to anything anymore.

Anyway, suffice to say triathlons and software development are both incredibly hard work, and you stand no chance of winning unless you've had a lot of practice. I think there is more fun in all of us agreeing and patting each other on the back, than in arguing what is ultimately harder.

Re: Goodbye Cocoa

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:28:10 -0000

Re: No Inline Markdown, Please

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:10:30 -0000

Hi Bill - I'll keep this in mind as I plan features for 2.0. In the mean time, you could get a lot of mileage out of a MarsEdit script that markdowns/unmarkdowns the selected post window. I'm not sure if anybody has already written one or not.

Re: It is the little things that make me happy

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:54:11 -0000

Paul: MarsEdit uses "standard" APIs, and in fact for the most part they boil down to MovableType and MetaWeblog these days. (MovableType is actually a superset of MetaWeblog). Atom is coming up but not yet too popular among the systems.

I wrote a post about supporting MarsEdit from a custom blog:

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/292/marsedit-fo...

You might find it interesting!

Re: MarsEdit 2.3 is out and supports Tumblr

Daniel Jalkut — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:00:47 -0000

Hi Colin - thanks for the kind words.

John, I dropped you a line at your email address as discovered via your web page.

Daniel

Re: Yahoo recruiter wants my resume

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:40:38 -0000

It does seem sort of prima donna-ish to play up the fact that, in some circles at least, you're well-enough known that a resume is not necessary. I find the Yahoo recruiter's "mistake" charming. While he probably should be a bit more rigorous in his pre-contact research, the end result was that he treated you like, you know, a person gets treated. Is that so bad?

At the end of the day we're all superstars to few and nobodies to most. Burning bridges with recruiters probably feels good right now in the wake of your new job, but who knows - maybe someday you'll wish you had a nice in at Yahoo (I realize you probably do, regardless). Or that you hadn't used your soapbox to celebrate the failure of somebody in this industry to cower at your webbiness. I'd err on the side of humility. It just feels better.

Re: Why you should always treat your bosses well

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:29:41 -0000

"So, did he ever show you a resume?"

"Nope."

"Yeah, me neither."

:)

Re: Does Kiko predict more Web 2.0 failures?

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:03:20 -0000

I think Kiko was an interesting stab at the problem but ultimately it simply wasn't "insanely great" enough to beat the odds. I don't think their failure is a sign of any collapse. Merely that web software now has to be truly amazing or truly unique (is there a difference?) if it's going to succeed. Kiko was, by my recollection, plagued with the kinds of usability bugs caused by "too many features, too fast." If they'd started with more of a BaseCamp style mentality who knows how things would have gone.

Re: Have I lost my “blog power”?

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 09:26:59 -0000

I haven't followed your blog long enough to really witness a trend in one direction or another, but I am not surprised that a single story on your blog doesn't generate as huge a number of referrals as some might expect.

You seem to take more of a shotgun approach to blogging. Somedays you post as many as ten (!) entries (August 28, in recent history). I personally find this a bit exhausting, so I pretty much just scan the subjects for interesting keywords (which is all anybody should be expected to do, I guess - but on other blogs the title may be gibberish and I'll still read because the signal to noise ratio is much higher).

Whereas some blogs seem like 99% editorial filters, yours is more of a reflector dish. Too blinding to click through, at times.

Re: My endless quest for a blog editing client – back to MarsEdit

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:16:33 -0000

Thanks for writing about your MarsEdit experience. You're totally right on about some of the current shortcomings. But you're also right on about my commitment to keep working on the app. Look forward to better and better things!

Daniel