Red Sweater Software announced Thursday that it has acquired MarsEdit, the Mac OS X weblog publishing software originally created by Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire. Red Sweater acquired MarsEdit from NewsGator Technologies.
In a post to his own blog, Red Sweater Software owner Daniel Jalkut says that he’s been using MarsEdit for the past two years.
“This is a classic ‘everybody wins’ situation,” said Jalkut. “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.”
MarsEdit was originally released as a free add-on for registered NetNewsWire users. The software enables Mac users to post to blogs that use many common software back-ends to operate — everything from Blogger, Blogware and Blosxom to Movable Type, TypePad and WordPress. The software includes features to automate “pinging” to blog aggregation sites and adding Technorati tags, adding images in files and more.
Red Sweater Software’s other products include FlexTime, an activity timer; FastScripts, which lets you access AppleScripts by using keyboard shortcuts or a menu bar; and Clarion, which trains you to recognize music intervals.
Jalkut has recently blogged about his development of a Cocoa to Java application conversion he’s been working on, and wants to make it clear that MarsEdit is not that application.
“MarsEdit is completely Objective-C based from the get-go, and I couldn’t be happier about that,” he said.
Jalkut pledged to give current MarsEdit registered users free upgrades through the product’s 1.x lifecycle.