Saturday, May 24, 2008

Over the previous weeks Fern has been working hard backstage to add features and further refine his interface and now he is ready to take on the public. I'd like to introduce Fern 0.2 for Developers and Testers. This is what has been added and fixed in version 0.2:

Title System Working
New Progress Indicators
New Delete System
Update System Working
'New Post' feature added
Refined Application Messages
New NSTextView Editor (Not Finished)
Other minor fixes and changes.

What can you do with this version? You can login, select your blogs, view the posted entries, update or delete those entries or post a new one. The text support is still limited as you need to know some HTML to add links and change font styles but page breaking is done automatically.

What's coming in Version 0.3? A editor that doesn't require minor html knowledge to do things like bold and italic text and a better system for adding links. If you know any great resources of WYSIWYG editors for Cocoa, please drop a comment :) As well as other things, over the next few updates you will hopefully see a new login interface, saving drafts to disk, post statistics, comment viewing and support for images. It all takes time.

Why am I releasing a work-in-progress product to the public so early? I have been having some conversations with some people that wanted to use version 0.1 now so I decided to push 0.2 out a little early with mainly interface refinements. That way they can use and test each update of Fern as I go along. Please note that this is an Alpha release and not intended for professional or general use but recommended for beta testers and developers. If you do download Fern please drop a comment, it's quick and easy and I then I know who has downloaded it and what you think. Saying that, if you find an issue or have a feature request that was not mentioned above, please drop a comment to this post. Fern 0.2 requires Mac OS X 10.5.2. Enjoy!

Download
Screenshot

Cheers
Alex Mills

2 comments:

@micronauta said...

Very interesting. I came across your site looking for a tool that would let me import posts to blogger from RSS. NetNewsWire and MarsEdit can do that together but I would like something simpler and hopefully automatic. Just thinking out loud in case you are considering new features for future versions. All the best,

--
i.

Anonymous said...

Hey man,

That is a good idea, once I have the blogger side of things working I will begin further desktop features. I'm just days away (waiting on google...) from releasing a new preview version of Fern with something like 15 new features and updates. You will be able to edit and save posts offline, give posts labels and save account details for quick posting. Stay tuned! Your idea has been noted and I will look into it, cheers for your support. Hopefully I will get my iPhone 3G in a couple of days :)

Alex Mills