DOH!

Ok so here’s the deal…

I’m the kind of guy who buys a lot of Mac OS X ’shareware’ or other apps developed by indie developers. I enjoy evaluating and using the stuff.

For a while now, I’ve been a very happy user of MarsEdit. I bought it back before MarsEdit’s original author, Brent Simmons, moved to NewsGator and effectively stopped development on the app. MarsEdit has since transferred to Gus Mueller (I bought and use his VoodooPad app), and ultimately to the very capable hands of Daniel Jalkut, and by all accounts appears to be under furiously active development. This is good news.

(I also happen to be the satisfied owner of a license for another of Daniel’s applications, FlexTime.)

Anyhow, back on the very last day of the much-maligned MacHeist promotion, I decided to buy the $40 bundle. This bundle included, among other apps (some of which I already owned), the app that has completely changed my life, TextMate. Again, purchasing this type of Mac shareware bundle was not out of character for me — I heart Mac software.

Since buying TextMate, I pretty much refuse to type any significant amount text into any thing else. If I’m typing something other than email, chances are it’s XML, and I’m doing it in TextMate. That includes posts to this blog.

So as much as I have enjoyed using MarsEdit, ever since falling in love (lust?) with TextMate, I’ve bemoaned the need to switch back and forth between MarsEdit and TextMate to write to my blog.

The solution — it seemed — was to create another TextMate Plug-In that would allow me to easily fetch, edit, and create posts on my blog directly from TextMate.

I realize that TextMate already has a pretty cool text-based blogging bundle that allows you to do all of that. This bundle looks great, and I’m sure that a lot of people use it and enjoy it. But after twice learning and forgetting how to use the bundle, I realized that it wasn’t for me. What I really want is a GUI for posting to my blog from TextMate. That’s just how my brain works, and I apparently am not capable of remembering how to use the blogging bundle.

So last thursday night, I set out to create BlogMate. After a long weekend of near-constant hardcore hacking (I took a couple hours off to go out to The Vault in San Jose Friday night… first trip to a st8 dance club in years … was suffering cleavage offense within 15 seconds, but had fun) BlogMate was ready for testing late, late Sunday night.

I knew BlogMate would never compete with an app like MarsEdit on number and quality of features. I don’t have the time or desire to even try, let alone make it happen. Besides, like I said, since Mr. Jalkut has taken over development, it looks like MarsEdit development is moving forward at rapid pace. BlogMate was never about hoping competing with MarsEdit or any other app… I just thought that if I could at least make a basic, bare-bones plug-in that allowed me to do the basics with TextMate, it would be worthwhile, and I’d like to share it.

Cut to today when I’m reading some Mac news in NetNewsWire (another app I can’t live without… did I mention I buy a lot of Mac software?) and I notice a post on Daniel Jalkut’s blog mentioning BlogMate.

My first thought was wow… that’s pretty cool… even though it’s nowhere near MarsEdit in terms of features, Daniel could easily see BlogMate as somewhat of a competitor to an app he seems to be really working hard on… but as soon as he heard about BlogMate, he went out of his way to mention it on his blog. Pretty classy.

But after I read his post, a terrible realization dawned.

MarsEdit already supports blog editing from TextMate via its “Edit in External Editor” feature.

GGGGAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Had I realized this last Thursday, I would have never set out to develop BlogMate in the first place. Granted, this feature still isn’t exactly totally integrated with TextMate, but it’s about as much as you can hope for from a separate app, and it also happens to be about 90% of what I was looking for.

So now I’m really at a loss as to what to do with BlogMate. Quite frankly, I have not enjoyed working on the plugin all that much… and I had never planned to do much in the way of enhancements for the plugin after the basics were done… I just don’t have the time or inclination. But sporadic support and enhancements seemed like better than nothing when I didn’t realize there was already a great alternative (in MarsEdit’s External Editor feature).

One option is to try to pass the codebase on to another interested developer (if there were such a person), but that doesn’t really strike me as something I’d like to do. I’d much rather just encourage interested users to give MarsEdit a try… it really is quite nice. I’d truly rather support a developer for which I have a lot of respect, and who appears to be working very hard on an already great product. Since his product already does what I wanted in the first place, I’m more inclined to support him rather than attempt to compete with him.

I guess I’ll just think all of this over for a few days… I may still release a version of BlogMate… but if you’re interested, you really should give MarsEdit a try… it’s much more feature-rich, and, as I know now, also allows editing from TextMate in a pretty reasonable way.

sigh.