MarsEdit Breaks its Silence with ‘Sent to Weblog’ Sound
When you send off an email in Mail.app, the application makes a satisfying sound when it has successfully sent your message. While savoring this little notification the other day, I thought it would be gratifying if MarsEdit could do something similar when it sent my posts up to MacMembrane. I contacted the developer (or, rather, the application itself!) on Twitter. Here is his/its response:
Despite being somewhat embarrassed by this response (‘Why didn’t I think of that myself?’), I was really happy with the suggestion because it meant the solution to my desire was very easily achieved. Here’s how to use Growl to make MarsEdit play a ‘Successfully Posted’ sound. But first…
What are these applications?
MarsEdit is a plain text blogging client for the Mac that has a wealth of features that should satisfy the needs of most bloggers. I’ve written extensively about MarsEdit in the past so I won’t say too much about the application here other than to note that I’m a huge fan. If you want to see if MarsEdit is right for you then head over to Red Sweater Software to download a free 30 day trial. It’s 29.95 thereafter.
Growl is a kind of all-purpose visual and audio notification utility for your Mac. Growl is supported by a slew of applications natively (I use ’slew’ because I can’t find a precise number on the web!) and many more by adding simple plugins. In short, Growl lets you know what’s happening with an application when it’s not in the front, everything from displaying incoming mail to alerting you to new tweets in Twitterific. Growl is freeware.
Make them work together.
Like many apps, MarsEdit supports Growl notifications out of the box, letting you know if your new post has made it to your blog or been tripped up along the way. Because of this native support, it’s easy to add a sound to accompany the visual notification.
Open System Preferences and find the Growl preference pane at the bottom of the panel. Click on the Applications tab at the top of Growl’s preferences. Scroll down to find MarsEdit and double click the icon to edit the app’s alert preferences. Click on the Notifications tab. (Click the screenshot to enlarge.)
MarsEdit supports Growl notifications for four of it’s common tasks: Finished Refreshing Weblog, Finished Uploading File and, the task that concerns us here, Finished Sending to Weblog. Select the latter from the drop down notification list and set the Play Sound drop down menu to whatever you’d like to hear when MarsEdit sends up your writing to the web. Now MarsEdit will make some noise when it posts to your blog. Satisfying!
I’m quite pleased with this solution, although I do hope that MarsEdit adds a custom sound to its repertoire of features someday. Thanks to the developer for his ultra-fast, non-condesending reply on Twitter as well!
You can follow both MarsEdit and myself on Twitter. If you want to find some more great blogging tools, try Tools to Turn Your Mac into a Blogger’s Dream. If you already use MarsEdit, you might like these Two AppleScripts to Simplify Your MarsEdit Workflow.
