I’ve been looking for an OSX blogging client, and over the Christmas period I discovered Mars Edit. It’s pretty similar to Windows Live Writer in a lot of ways – it allows you to write, modify and remove posts from your blog. The interface, as you’d pretty much expect from a Mac app, is intuitive and gives you just about everything you need for basic blogging. There’s even a 30 day free trial (which I’m using now, just until I get around to buying a licence on Monday.

If you’re in the market for a Mac blogging tool, I’d recommend checking this out.

I’ve just knocked up a small example of a possible application – just search for C# related information. Minimal testing so far suggests that it might be quite useful…

The main use for the unit at home will be as a controller for the SlimServer software that runs my music collection, and it works really well. It takes just a few seconds to boot into the browser, connects wirelessly to my network, and shows me the page I need – all in the time it would take to power up the laptop.

As you may be able to see from the screenshots below, the rendering is not perfect, but it is a handheld device, and most pages aren’t desgined to cope too well with such little real estate, but the unit copes very well. I’m glad I bought it.

Nintendo DS Lite and Browser

This seem slike a really cool idea – a media play (looks vaguely familiar) with browser support, and remote mp3 playback.

I’ve just downloaded it for a look-see, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

There’s a small bug in the LiveWriter preferences pages. 

On the “plugins” tab, the user can enable / disable plugins using a couple of radio buttons.  Unfortunately, it appears that there is flawed logic to read the current setting of a plugin.  As a result, each time you select a plugin from the list, it’s status is set back to whatever it was when the preferences page was opened.  Not a major problem, I don’t suppose, but irritating enough to make me post about it. 

**UPDATE** how come MS make submitting a bug report such a pain in the @$$?  I have to subscribe to a group, so I can post a message that may not even be picked up by the developers?  To add insult to injusry, I can’t even join the group because of a problem wth Passport today.  Not happy.

enum myEnum { one, two, three, four, five, };
foreach (int i in Enum.GetValues(typeof(myEnum )))
{
myEnum myItem = (myEnum )Enum.ToObject(typeof(myEnum ), i);
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(myItem.ToString());
}


I have also tidied up the source code for the plugin, thus making it possible for me to release that without being too ashamed of my coding.  I’m not normally as sloppy as when I coded the first pass of the plugin, but I was in kind of a hurry.  It’s all sorted out now, though, and you should be able to get the source from here, or the pre-compiled goodness from here.

IMPORTANT NOTE : If you are going to use the new version and have an older version installed, I advise you to delete the old plugin assembly, called “LiveWriterPlugins.dll”, from the Plugins folder.  If you don’t, there won’t be any major problems, but you will have two copies of the plugin – the old one, and the updated one.  It’s my fault, I know. I should have given the thing a more meaningful name in the first place, but like I said above, I was rushing.