It’s hardly a surprise to explain that we love the blogging here at MacUser. And while plenty of people are happy using the web interface to do their daily scribbles, the weapon of choice for MacUser’s co-editors is MarsEdit. The application was originally developed by Brent Simmons of Ranchero (creator of NetNewsWire); NetNewsWire was acquired in 2005 by NewsGator, and while MarsEdit went along for the ride, the app appeared to largely be in stasis.
This morning, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software (and Friend of the Blog) announced that he was acquiring the program from NewsGator:
This is a classic “everybody wins” situation. Users are going to see a a lot more development activity, Brent and NewsGator are happy to see the application in my capable hands, and I get the satisfaction of steering the future of one of my favorite applications. Precious!Dan and Brent also answered some questions over at NewsGator’s site, including why Brent decided to sell:
I spend all my time working on NetNewsWire. It’s fun to work on MarsEdit, and I have lots of great ideas (many of them from MarsEdit users) about what to do next with MarsEdit. I would, frankly, love to keep working on it — but I also love working on NetNewsWire. So, the question turned into this: given that I don’t have time to work on it, who, among all the Mac developers of the world, would do a great job with it? The first person I thought of was Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software.The MacUser team couldn’t be more thrilled: blogging is literally bread-and-butter for some of us, and we’ve already got a mile-long list of improvements that’re sure to make Monsieur Jalkut wish that he had never become Twitter buddies with us.
